ITL its going to be sat phones instead of cellphones.
the iPhone in Eyes Turned Skywards...
the iPhone in Eyes Turned Skywards...
I'll just point out that much of that post could be OTL. There were several constellations of leo and meo satellites proposed, although Iridium was the only one launched. And it went bankrupt and almost let the satellites decay.
If those satellites had gotten off the ground a couple of years earlier, or if the dotcom bubble had held of for that time, we might have had several constellations in orbit.
Be intersting to see what happens ittl.
If those satellites had gotten off the ground a couple of years earlier, or if the dotcom bubble had held of for that time, we might have had several constellations in orbit.
Be intersting to see what happens ittl.
We've had a lot change in our plans over the nearly 3 years this has been cooking, and that was one thing. Unfortunately, we in some cases foreshadowed places early on that we didn't end up going, and that's one of them. With only a 30-day edit window, though, it's not possible to go back and edit 2-year-old posts like that.
Perfectly understandable. Writing Alternate history is a lot of hard work and research.
Part III: Post 12: Lunar exploration and planning in Moon in preparation for the Artemis program
Good afternoon, everybody! It's that time again here, and I'm very pleased to be bringing you this week's Eyes Turned Skyward post. We've covered a lot of the political wrangling on the manned side of the Artemis program, but we've yet to touch on the unmanned missions that will precede Artemis back to the moon in preparation. That changes this week with another of Workable Goblin's amazing probe posts--I hope you all enjoy it as much as I always enjoy seeing these come together. Anyway, without further ado.....on to the moon!
Eyes Turned Skyward, Part III: Post #12
Even before the publication of the Exploration Report at the beginning of 1990, it had become clear that any future human missions to the Moon would be preceded by wave of robotic explorers. Despite being the second-most explored world in the Solar System behind only Earth itself, the American and Soviet missions of the 1960s and 1970s had left many open questions behind them, ripe for answers from new missions, as well as new problems that mission planners of a previous era had never known to confront. While many of these questions and problems could be answered or addressed without any precursor missions, or safely deferred until crewed flights, some loomed as open issues that could delay or derail future missions before they even left the ground.
Among the most serious of these was the lunar dust issue; while a few scientists had predicted that the lunar surface would be coated with a large amount of dust, they believed that this would prevent successful soft landings on the Moon, with any spacecraft sinking instantly into an ocean of fine grains. The actual problem of sticky, sharp-edged particles coating all surfaces and damaging seals and joints went unsuspected until the Apollo missions, when astronauts had had to confront their spacesuits and spacecraft becoming rapidly fouled by lunar dust. The similarity of the dust to the agents behind diseases like silicosis and black lung disease on Earth raised further questions about the safety of extended habitation on the lunar surface. Besides these looming technical problems waited a scientific question, spurred by observations by several Apollo missions of strange structures--variously referred to as “bands” or “streamers”--around sunrise or sunset. Some scientists had proposed that these odd formations of light could be created by sunlight falling on dust particles levitated from the Moon by electrostatic forces; if so, this effect might also explain a number of other observations, not only by the Apollo and Surveyor program but perhaps even by earlier astronomers. If lunar dust did levitate and move over the surface of the Moon, this would also have an impact on designing systems to resist the abrasive and damaging effects of the dust, particularly systems that would be expected to be stationary for long periods of time. Therefore, while solving the dust problem would be a matter of engineering, researching the dust question would play a role in that engineering, and determining the exact properties and behavior of the dust would be a useful task prior to any human missions being launched or hardware being built.
Somewhat smaller in scale loomed the mascon problem. Unlike Earth’s relatively smooth gravitational field, the lunar gravitational field had proved to be “lumpy,” with many areas of higher or lower-than-average field strength. This makes low lunar orbits highly unstable, in contrast to their Earthly counterparts, forcing probes to spend more propellant for a mission of a given length in order to remain in orbit, rather than resting on the lunar surface. While not ultimately a huge problem, this lumpiness had spelled the doom of several clever concepts involving subsatellites which would, with little on-board propulsive capability, quickly crash into the lunar surface. In any case, a better lunar gravitational anomaly map would help mission planners optimize orbit-keeping requirements, saving precious kilograms of propellant that would otherwise be needed for stabilizing orbits. Such a map would also be valuable to geologists, who could compare the hidden subsurface features revealed by gravitational anomalies to surface maps and compositional data to infer new facts about the lunar interior. As with quantifying the lunar dust environment, producing a high-precision map of the lunar gravitational field would be a valuable input to human missions.
New technological developments and new mission designs had also created new challenges, as well. While planners of the 1960s had largely assumed human involvement throughout mission operations--even in lunar base development scenarios, cargo landers were often assumed to be guided down by a human pilot--the rapid improvement of microelectronics since then had led to a new assumption of significant automation throughout mission operations. Return capsules waiting in orbit would be uncrewed; cargo landers would automatically deliver themselves. Even where there was human involvement, it might be remote and distant, employing workers in office buildings instead of spaceships to teleoperate equipment on the Moon. However, even with the gigantic jumps that had taken place in computer technology over the past two decades, automated systems were still less flexible and responsive to unexpected events than human-controlled ones. If automation was going to be heavily utilized in a return to the Moon, efforts would need to be taken to ensure that these automated systems would never face an unexpected event; that when a lander landed or a rover roved, it would never find a boulder in its landing ellipse or a surprise hill to climb. That the guidance systems of these spacecraft would always be able to find their way to where they needed to be.
Modern mission planners were also more ambitious than those of previous eras. Where Apollo planners had been content enough to design a system that could land a man on the Moon and return him to Earth, modern planners wanted to do that and maximize scientific return. Missions to the lunar poles, where vast deposits of ice might exist, or to the lunar far side, with its vastly different landscape and unusual topography compared to the near posed an entirely new set of challenges, among the greatest of which was communications. During Apollo, communicating with the Earth was, for the spacecraft on the Moon, relatively simple: they needed merely to point an antenna and transmit. For a mission among the cragged mountains and permanent shadows of the poles, however, or on the far side where the Earth never rises, adopting such a solution would leave Earth out of contact with its explorers for weeks, a clearly unacceptable option. What was needed were communications satellites, just like on Earth, orbiting the Moon to provide a relay to the far side or the terrain around the poles. Such satellites could also serve as navigational beacons, helping to improve the precision of celestial navigation for lunar surface explorers and lunar landers.
These problems were all on the mind of mission planners and engineers as they prepared the Exploration Report, and as a result the Report proposed a series of lunar missions to help resolve outstanding questions and set up the infrastructure needed for sustained exploration. As a follow-on to the Lunar Reconnaissance Pioneer, a pair of orbiters would be sent to the Moon in the mid-1990s. Unlike the LRP, which could only map the near-side gravitational field through careful tracking of its Earth-bound signals, these two would communicate with each other to map the far-side field as well, and at higher resolution. They would also carry cameras to resolve proposed landing sites in just the sort of exquisite detail needed for automated precision landing, and instruments to help resolve the question of whether or not there really was water ice in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles. While complete confirmation would have to wait on a geologist or probe actually collecting samples and returning them to Earth for analysis, scientists had dreamed up numerous techniques to increase or decrease confidence in the presence of ice which could be carried by an orbiter, some of which would fly on the proposed spacecraft. Later in the decade, only a year or two before the beginning of Artemis operations, a set of communications satellites would need to be launched to support surface activities. In an early appearance of EML-2 in Artemis planning, the Report suggested that it might make a good position for a communications satellite constellation; only four or five satellites would be needed to achieve complete hemispherical coverage, and station-keeping demands would be less than in low lunar orbit, saving a considerable amount of money in constructing and launching the relay spacecraft.
The Report was more vague about possible robotic surface operations, suggesting that rovers or sample return missions might be dispatched to some proposed landing sites to investigate whether or not they were suitable for human missions, that fixed landers might carry prototype resource-processing payloads, that they might be used to investigate possible methods of mitigating dust impacts, or that they might be used for certain high-risk missions--one possibility mentioned in passing was a “rock climber” mission that would dangle an instrument package down one of the “skylights” found by LRP to investigate the interior of a lunar lava tube. Ultimately, however, the Report was palpably uncertain about the value of surface precursor missions compared to orbital ones, suggesting idea after idea but then stating that they needed further study before they could be accepted or rejected as part of the final plan.
As NASA moved from developing a plan to convincing the Bush Administration--not to mention Congress--to support it, other interests beyond the purely technical began to make themselves known in precursor planning. President Bush’s longstanding interest in foreign policy, coupled with the ongoing success of the Freedom collaboration, led to suggestions from the State Department, senior Administration officials, and the President himself that NASA pursue international cooperation in a return to the Moon. Outside of government, a variety of individuals and groups similarly proposed that Constellation include a substantial international component, ranging from Carl Sagan’s optimistic vision of joint American-Soviet missions with perhaps some European and Japanese contributions to more hardline or pessimistic views of mostly American missions with maybe a few instruments or devices from overseas. The Exploration Report itself had suggested that international collaboration be studied, but the Office of Exploration had largely considered such questions as falling beyond its competence, assuming generally that any mission would be basically American with perhaps some token international involvement. Now, the question of what form that involvement would take was rearing its head, and NASA began to reach out to ESA and ISAS to begin to answer. Tentative contacts were even made with Soviet space authorities, with whom President Bush had some idea of forging agreements to help prevent the spread of advanced weapons technology, but the chaotic environment of the slowly collapsing Soviet state prevented firm agreements from being made.
Encouraged by their important role in the construction of Space Station Freedom, both Europe and Japan insisted on playing more than a token role in the upcoming lunar missions, going beyond the modest limits set by the Office of Exploration. While neither had much appetite for replacing the most expensive and critical American contributions--the launch vehicle, the transport capsule, the lunar lander--they were more than willing to argue for Mitsubishi building lunar rovers or Zeiss building camera optics, important but relatively simple and cheap elements of the mission. Both also seized on precursor missions as an area where they could possibly make outsized contributions, digging up lunar mission proposals that their own scientists and engineers had made in the past and reworking them to fit in the framework of Project Constellation. A European proposal to build a small ion-propelled spacecraft as a technology demonstrator prior to the operational use of the engines, which had been forestalled by the approval of Piazzi as a major European mission, was resurrected and reworked as a pair of spacecraft for gravity mapping, for example, while a Japanese proposal to send a stretched version of their Halley probes was suggested as one method of investigating the scientific side of the dust question.
These efforts to secure an important place for its partners at the table intersected with growing discontent in Congress at the scale and cost of the proposed American dual-orbiter mission. Facing a dearth of missions beyond Cassini’s launch in 1994, JPL quickly went to work to secure its position in Project Constellation, trying to quickly set the mission design. The result was a “Christmas tree” of a complex probe with many instruments, able to address virtually every outstanding question possible, albeit at considerable expense. The same impulses that led Congress to reject “Option B” and a commitment to lunar bases in favor of cheaper sorties also led them to reject the inevitably costly JPL dual-orbiter mission. Offers by America’s allies to supply far less costly spacecraft to address some of its roles were a potent weapon in Congressional arguments against NASA’s spending; why shouldn’t NASA save $250 million here, $150 million there by taking them up on their offer, they asked? Under Congressional pressure, and with little Administration commitment to a particular architecture, NASA crumbled; the JPL orbiter was downscoped to address just two questions, that of the presence of water ice and landing site preparation, while the ESA and Japanese proposals were accepted as part of their contributions to the Artemis Program, much as they had contributed to Freedom.
Just as this agreement was hashed out, however, events conspired to force even more international work on NASA. The collapse of the Soviet Union had led to worries that, in the chaotic economic state of post-Soviet Russia, the advanced military technologies of the Soviets might be sold to rogue states or terrorists, allowing them to strike with ballistic missiles or even nuclear weaponry. These fears had been stoked by the deals made between the Russian space industry and India and China to provide technical assistance to the space programs of the latter two countries; while the transfer of technology to two nuclear-armed states already in possession of ballistic missile technology posed little risk of proliferation, it seemed an ominous sign to those in Washington and Brussels that the Russian arms industry might be overly morally flexible for their tastes. To forestall this possibility, European and American politicians agreed that they needed to inject their own funds into the Russian weapons industry, keeping scientists and engineers working on dual-use technologies gainfully employed rather than assisting Kim Il-Sung or those of his ilk in building ICBMs and nuclear warheads for them.
With spaceflight a major nexus of dual-use technologies, one significant arm of this effort was in ensuring the Russian space industry remained focused on satellites and launch vehicles. Despite Gore’s turn away from Mars, the joint Russian-American Fobos Together mission that had been proposed in the last year of the Bush administration as part of the Ares Program was steadily moving forwards, and efforts were made to find other areas of possible cooperation. As an ongoing and not yet entirely defined program, Artemis was the natural choice for the State Department to search for possible areas of cooperation between NASA and Roscosmos. Although a range of proposals were proposed, such as NASA use of the larger Vulkan variants for translunar launches or Russian-built surface habitats or hardware, attention quickly narrowed to simpler, more modest areas where the American and Russian programs could cooperate. One area highlighted by the discussions was in communications support; besides the Soviet deep-space communications network, which could be repurposed to support Artemis operations as an additional backup, the Soviet Union had developed and built its own communications satellite industry completely independently of the west, with attractively low costs compared to Western manufacturers. While some modifications would be needed to the equipment being developed for Artemis to allow relay through Russian satellites, given the early stage of design and construction these changes would be relatively straightforward, simple, and, therefore, cheap to implement. Along with the provision of engines for the lander upper stages, the Mesyat communications network, named after a lunar goddess of the pre-Christian Slavic religion, would be one of the largest contributions made by Russia to the Artemis Program, earning them a seat on one of the lunar flights, as with Europe and Japan.
Even as negotiations between the the two former adversaries were moving forwards, so too was development and construction of the precursors. The Richards-Davis report supported the division of labor that NASA had been implementing, finalizing the number of precursor probes at three: JPL’s imaging/ice spacecraft, ESA’s gravity mapper, and ISAS’ dust explorer. Other precursor proposals were discarded and left as little more than historical curiosities for those of a later age to wonder about, any scientific questions they might have addressed left for human missions to address.
With work on Cassini turning from construction to final launch preparations, JPL’s program hit the ground running with a fully engaged and ready workforce. With what were essentially two separate missions assigned to the same spacecraft and a hard deadline of 1997 for launch, so that the probe’s data could be fully processed and ready before it needed to be used for the actual Artemis missions, JPL was under a great deal of pressure to deliver on time and under budget, something its last several missions had had trouble with. While neither the optical side of the mission--imaging proposed landing sites in considerable detail to detect obstacles and build navigational charts for future landers to use--nor the ice side--integrating several different theoretical methods of detect water ice to avoid possible bias and error--posed any especially new problems to the laboratory, the pressure cooker environment and subordination to human spaceflight goals were new, or at least unwelcome reminders of a distant past they had done their best to shed since the 1960s.
Even as development was actually proceeding exceptionally smoothly, at least by the standards of planetary exploration, therefore, the mood around the lab was tense. As the biggest and most important project floating JPL, the Lunar Ice Observer, as it was known, occupied pride of place, but unlike its predecessors it was a tenuous and contested position. There was constant worry, especially from those not directly involved in the project, that LIO might be a Trojan Horse for tighter central control over the famously independent JPL, that it might represent the first stage in a decline of American planetary science--with the launch of Cassini and the MTRs in 1994, JPL had no independent planetary science missions in planning or development for the first time in decades--or other, more fantastic fears. These fears were further stoked, ironically, by the low-key nature of the technical challenges involved; solar power, minimal delta-V requirements, and short duration (by the standard of most of the lab’s recent missions, at least) provided no opportunity to really show off JPL’s technical prowess, and prove that it was still a valuable member of NASA.
Opportunity, however, was soon to come. Shortly before the demise of LRP in 1993, several of the mission’s scientists proposed a novel and, even better, cheap and quick method of checking whether the mission’s apparent detection of water ice in polar craters had been correct or a misinterpretation of a spurious signal, suggesting that the probe be deliberately targeted on one of the craters in question at the end of its mission. During its impact, it would churn up and vaporize a certain amount of material from the crater surface, among which might be some water ice, which in turn could be spectroscopically detected from telescopes on Earth trained on the Moon’s southern limb. As it would potentially add a significant amount of scientific value to the mission at virtually no extra cost, the mission modification was quickly approved, and LRP was duly crashed into a crater near the lunar south pole. Unfortunately, the results were negative, although supporters of the lunar ice hypothesis were quick to point out that many circumstances could have led to a negative reading; the crater targeted might not have had extensive ice deposits, for example, the deposits might be patchy and by chance the probe had not hit any of them, and so on and so forth. Rather than the conclusive end to the lunar ice debate that planners had hoped for, the experiment became just another datum for scientists to bicker about.
Nevertheless, LIO designers at JPL took note of the innovative approach, and quickly came up with their own method of using it. Rather than crash their spacecraft, which anyways had a lengthy mission of its own ahead of it, they would crash the transfer stage used to inject the probe on a translunar trajectory, much like later Apollo missions had done with their S-IVB stages. And, by shaving weight off of the main probe and taking advantage of the extra capabilities of the new Delta 5000, they would be able to include an extra, simple spacecraft on the stack, just enough to follow the transfer stage in and analyze the results from extreme close range before adding its own punch. This could help detect trace or faint signals of water ice in the plume that might otherwise elude Earth-based telescopes, not to mention widening the selection of target craters and improving targeting precision.
When LIO launched aboard a Delta 5000 in late 1997, this subsidiary probe, now named the Ballistics Lunar Analysis SpacecrafT, or BLAST, tagged along, mounted on the tip of the Centaur transfer stage. After putting LIO on a lunar transfer trajectory, BLAST, together with the Centaur, separated and adjusted their course, looping around the Moon as LIO put itself into orbit to optimize their eventual impact trajectory. A few weeks after launch, after several more gravity assist passages, BLAST separated from the Centaur as it neared the Moon, this time bound not for a fly-by but for impact. As the Centaur itself hit, LIO itself rose up above the lunar horizon to watch as BLAST flew through the plume and then into the Moon itself in a bit of choreography that had been arranged through the multiple lunar flybys to provide the best data possible for scientists on Earth. Unfortunately, that data, again, failed to definitively end the debate. While NASA claimed significant evidence for water in their observations, skeptical outsiders questioned their conclusions, a matter not helped by the smaller than expected plume, which was only just detected by the largest Earth-based telescopes trained on the predicted impact site. With no corroborating data from outside parties, it was up to LIO itself or, as a last resort, the Artemis missions to finally show whether or not ice really exists on the Moon.
LIO delivered. Besides a powerful built-in SAR array, designed to help overcome the problems with LRP’s bistatic radar experiments, LIO carried an array of particle spectrometers designed to extend and supplement LRP’s observations, particularly by detecting hydrogen, one of the elements that make up water. Since hydrogen is rare in lunar regolith, while oxygen is highly abundant, any areas of concentration would be of interest even if the hydrogen was not bound up in ice deposits, although water ice was the most likely and plausible method of binding large amounts of hydrogen. During repeated passes over shadowed craters identified during LRP’s mission, these spectrometers discovered significant evidence of large concentrations of hydrogen, and therefore water ice, along with very unexpected findings that seemed to indicate a relatively large amount of hydrated, or water-bearing, minerals on the lunar surface, especially around the poles. Concurrent investigations on material from the Apollo missions, especially Apollos 15, 17, and 18, which visited formerly volcanically active areas, showed that previous studies had grossly underestimated how hydrated lunar interior materials could be, providing substantial evidence of volatile presence in ancient glass spheres from lunar fire fountains. In fact, these results seemed to indicate, the Moon’s interior is about as volatile-rich as Earth’s, with expected primordial abundances in the material similar to those found in basalts erupting from Earth’s mid-ocean ridges.
In parallel with these studies, LIO was producing other useful work, with the radar array being used also to characterize the radar appearance of possible landing areas and other regions for later use, not only in support of landings but also to improve knowledge of the lunar near-surface and its properties under radar illumination, to avoid possible future misinterpretations of radar data. The camera, of course, was providing hugely detailed imagery of great swathes of the surface around possible landing sites and other locations of interest, extending LRP’s imaging of the the landing sites of the Apollo, Surveyor, and Luna missions. And with LIO’s other results, these possible landing sites were increasingly clustered around the poles, which had become the top scientific targets for Artemis missions. Indeed, four of the five top scientific objectives of the Artemis missions, on the brink of finally launching, were directly or indirectly related to absolutely confirming and characterizing the lunar ice deposits LIO and LRP had discovered. While JPL was still wary about becoming too involved in the human program, LIO still stood as a significant and very public success even as Cassini continued to wind its way towards Saturn and Liberty continued to hang from its lander-delivery platform on Mars.
In parallel with JPL’s work on LIO, engineers and scientists in Japan and Europe were developing their own spacecraft. With considerably more experience in planetary exploration than ISAS, ESA’s GRavity and Interior Magma Analysis at Long Distance Investigation, or Grimaldi, after one of the originators of the modern system for naming lunar features, Francesco Maria Grimaldi, was progressing much more smoothly than its Japanese counterpart SELENE, despite the relative technical simplicity of the latter probe. The modifications needed to the probe body to survive the considerably different thermal environment of low lunar orbit, not to mention the significant structural changes necessary to support the planned instrument package, were becoming more difficult than anticipated, while it was increasingly clear that the Japanese budgetary situation would never again be as free and liberal as it had been during the 1980s. These factors combined to cause repeated problems for the Japanese spacecraft, worrying mission planners in Houston and Washington D.C. who wanted the information on the lunar dust environment that it would provide to help guide their design of key surface equipment such as space suits and airlocks. Scientists interested in the data it would provide were also worried that it might be delayed, and ultimately unable to sample a relatively pristine, human-free lunar atmosphere, decreasing the utility and scientific value of its results. Nevertheless, the Japanese continued plugging along without significant outside support, diverting resources from other, less critical programs towards SELENE to ensure that it launched on time.
In any case, the problems the Japanese were having with SELENE paled in comparison to the ones the Russians were having with their communications satellites, probably the most important of all the precursor spacecraft. Unlike the others, these were an absolute requirement for human landings at many of the proposed Artemis mission sites, and would be needed at least before the launch of any farside, polar, or limb missions. While Russia certainly had the technical expertise and historical experience to build such spacecraft, the difficult financial state of their space program made it hard for them to bring that experience and expertise to bear, and NASA was repeatedly forced to beg Congress to appropriate more funds to assist Roscosmos in ensuring the satellites were built on time, at the same time it was being forced to increase appropriations for the joint Fobos Together mission. While nonproliferation concerns continued to weigh heavily in Congressional minds, especially after 1994, of greater weight was the simple fact that it was too late for the United States to change course. Having assigned responsibility for the communications network to Russia, it would now be slower and more expensive to begin development of an American alternative to the Russian system than it would be to simply cough up the necessary funds for accelerating Mesyat development.
Nevertheless, cost overruns in Mesyat had consequences. In an effort to shave expenses, Congress repeatedly considered making up the difference by cutting the budget of other NASA programs, with Fobos Together being a particularly popular target. While these cuts were staved off by narrow margins--in one case, in fact, the Senate failed to pass an amendment which would have canceled the program altogether by only a single vote--they were fuel to the fire for the program’s already troubling issues, significant contributing to its later issues. In the end, though, Fobos Together, like Mesyat, would continue, Russia too vital a partner and the problems at hand too important to allow temporary concerns to override sound diplomacy.
As budgetary conflicts and technical issues were challenging two of Artemis’ international partners, though, the third was racing ahead. Only a few months after LIO, the Grimaldi probes left Kourou aboard a Europa 4 in a picture-perfect launch towards the Moon. Quickly settling themselves into a close lunar orbit, they immediately set to work, using a high-precision data link between the two spacecraft to track the tiny changes in distance induced by lunar gravity. As accurate on the far side as the near, within a year Grimaldi had produced a revolutionary new gravity map of the lunar surface, far more detailed than any ever previously created. This data would not only inform mission planners of useful, stable orbits to use during transfers between the lunar surface and EML-2, but also had tremendous scientific value. As on Earth, it could be used to trace the Moon’s subsurface structure, and within months of the release of the first version of the Grimaldi map, it had already begun to help scientists better understand the history of lunar impacts by describing the subsurface structure of major lunar impact basins. As the Moon is a key point of reference for describing conditions across the early inner solar system, this work had implications for research involving Mercury, Venus, Mars, and even the asteroid belt, besides the Moon and Earth themselves.
Towards the end of the year, Japan’s SELENE, now renamed Kaguya after the well-known moon princess of Japanese legend, joined the growing constellation at the Moon after launch atop a Japanese Mu-IV rocket, a new solid fuel vehicle growing out of their efforts to develop a domestic capability to build the boosters used by the H-1 and new H-II rockets. Despite its relatively simple and small instrument loadout, Kaguya would be the last and in some ways the most important piece of the scientific puzzle, addressing the long-standing dust issue. While it could not, of course, measure dust levels at the lunar surface, it could still indirectly answer important questions about dust behavior. Kaguya’s scientific results could also answer important questions about the behavior of the atmosphere and dust of other solar system bodies, particularly those like Mercury, Triton, or many of the other moons of the outer solar system with no more than a very tenuous envelope of gases. It discovered significant levels of charged dust at low altitude near the terminator, explaining certain curious observations by the Apollo astronauts, as well as studying the composition of the dust (similar to the surface regolith) and the thin lunar atmosphere. Despite the relatively limited results, it still provided information valuable to the manufacturers of the equipment that would be used on the Moon and marked an important step forwards for the Japanese space program as only their second beyond Earth orbit mission.
Besides these three successes, 1997 had one final piece of good news for the Artemis program; in December, the first set of the Mesyat satellites to launch had finally arrived at Baikonur. While check-out and mating with their Vulkan launch vehicle would delay their arrival at the Moon until April of 1998, this marked a welcome piece of good news for mission planners anxiously awaiting Mesyat’s deployment. By early 1999, the five satellites of the Mesyat network--four primaries in a halo orbit around EML-2 and a fifth on-orbit spare--had been delivered, providing global communications coverage to the lunar surface.
Altogether, as the millenium wound to a close, a new era of the “armada” was dawning. Unlike the “comet armada” of 1986, or the Mars and Venus concentrations of an earlier era, though, this had been planned, and each element was part of a greater whole. Russian communications, European gravity observations, Japanese dust research, and American imaging and spectroscopy were all working together, each contributing . And behind them, as the last year of the 20th century began, were humans: building hardware, studying landing sites, and practicing for extended missions on the lunar surface.
It had been a long time. But they were returning.
Eyes Turned Skyward, Part III: Post #12
Even before the publication of the Exploration Report at the beginning of 1990, it had become clear that any future human missions to the Moon would be preceded by wave of robotic explorers. Despite being the second-most explored world in the Solar System behind only Earth itself, the American and Soviet missions of the 1960s and 1970s had left many open questions behind them, ripe for answers from new missions, as well as new problems that mission planners of a previous era had never known to confront. While many of these questions and problems could be answered or addressed without any precursor missions, or safely deferred until crewed flights, some loomed as open issues that could delay or derail future missions before they even left the ground.
Among the most serious of these was the lunar dust issue; while a few scientists had predicted that the lunar surface would be coated with a large amount of dust, they believed that this would prevent successful soft landings on the Moon, with any spacecraft sinking instantly into an ocean of fine grains. The actual problem of sticky, sharp-edged particles coating all surfaces and damaging seals and joints went unsuspected until the Apollo missions, when astronauts had had to confront their spacesuits and spacecraft becoming rapidly fouled by lunar dust. The similarity of the dust to the agents behind diseases like silicosis and black lung disease on Earth raised further questions about the safety of extended habitation on the lunar surface. Besides these looming technical problems waited a scientific question, spurred by observations by several Apollo missions of strange structures--variously referred to as “bands” or “streamers”--around sunrise or sunset. Some scientists had proposed that these odd formations of light could be created by sunlight falling on dust particles levitated from the Moon by electrostatic forces; if so, this effect might also explain a number of other observations, not only by the Apollo and Surveyor program but perhaps even by earlier astronomers. If lunar dust did levitate and move over the surface of the Moon, this would also have an impact on designing systems to resist the abrasive and damaging effects of the dust, particularly systems that would be expected to be stationary for long periods of time. Therefore, while solving the dust problem would be a matter of engineering, researching the dust question would play a role in that engineering, and determining the exact properties and behavior of the dust would be a useful task prior to any human missions being launched or hardware being built.
Somewhat smaller in scale loomed the mascon problem. Unlike Earth’s relatively smooth gravitational field, the lunar gravitational field had proved to be “lumpy,” with many areas of higher or lower-than-average field strength. This makes low lunar orbits highly unstable, in contrast to their Earthly counterparts, forcing probes to spend more propellant for a mission of a given length in order to remain in orbit, rather than resting on the lunar surface. While not ultimately a huge problem, this lumpiness had spelled the doom of several clever concepts involving subsatellites which would, with little on-board propulsive capability, quickly crash into the lunar surface. In any case, a better lunar gravitational anomaly map would help mission planners optimize orbit-keeping requirements, saving precious kilograms of propellant that would otherwise be needed for stabilizing orbits. Such a map would also be valuable to geologists, who could compare the hidden subsurface features revealed by gravitational anomalies to surface maps and compositional data to infer new facts about the lunar interior. As with quantifying the lunar dust environment, producing a high-precision map of the lunar gravitational field would be a valuable input to human missions.
New technological developments and new mission designs had also created new challenges, as well. While planners of the 1960s had largely assumed human involvement throughout mission operations--even in lunar base development scenarios, cargo landers were often assumed to be guided down by a human pilot--the rapid improvement of microelectronics since then had led to a new assumption of significant automation throughout mission operations. Return capsules waiting in orbit would be uncrewed; cargo landers would automatically deliver themselves. Even where there was human involvement, it might be remote and distant, employing workers in office buildings instead of spaceships to teleoperate equipment on the Moon. However, even with the gigantic jumps that had taken place in computer technology over the past two decades, automated systems were still less flexible and responsive to unexpected events than human-controlled ones. If automation was going to be heavily utilized in a return to the Moon, efforts would need to be taken to ensure that these automated systems would never face an unexpected event; that when a lander landed or a rover roved, it would never find a boulder in its landing ellipse or a surprise hill to climb. That the guidance systems of these spacecraft would always be able to find their way to where they needed to be.
Modern mission planners were also more ambitious than those of previous eras. Where Apollo planners had been content enough to design a system that could land a man on the Moon and return him to Earth, modern planners wanted to do that and maximize scientific return. Missions to the lunar poles, where vast deposits of ice might exist, or to the lunar far side, with its vastly different landscape and unusual topography compared to the near posed an entirely new set of challenges, among the greatest of which was communications. During Apollo, communicating with the Earth was, for the spacecraft on the Moon, relatively simple: they needed merely to point an antenna and transmit. For a mission among the cragged mountains and permanent shadows of the poles, however, or on the far side where the Earth never rises, adopting such a solution would leave Earth out of contact with its explorers for weeks, a clearly unacceptable option. What was needed were communications satellites, just like on Earth, orbiting the Moon to provide a relay to the far side or the terrain around the poles. Such satellites could also serve as navigational beacons, helping to improve the precision of celestial navigation for lunar surface explorers and lunar landers.
These problems were all on the mind of mission planners and engineers as they prepared the Exploration Report, and as a result the Report proposed a series of lunar missions to help resolve outstanding questions and set up the infrastructure needed for sustained exploration. As a follow-on to the Lunar Reconnaissance Pioneer, a pair of orbiters would be sent to the Moon in the mid-1990s. Unlike the LRP, which could only map the near-side gravitational field through careful tracking of its Earth-bound signals, these two would communicate with each other to map the far-side field as well, and at higher resolution. They would also carry cameras to resolve proposed landing sites in just the sort of exquisite detail needed for automated precision landing, and instruments to help resolve the question of whether or not there really was water ice in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles. While complete confirmation would have to wait on a geologist or probe actually collecting samples and returning them to Earth for analysis, scientists had dreamed up numerous techniques to increase or decrease confidence in the presence of ice which could be carried by an orbiter, some of which would fly on the proposed spacecraft. Later in the decade, only a year or two before the beginning of Artemis operations, a set of communications satellites would need to be launched to support surface activities. In an early appearance of EML-2 in Artemis planning, the Report suggested that it might make a good position for a communications satellite constellation; only four or five satellites would be needed to achieve complete hemispherical coverage, and station-keeping demands would be less than in low lunar orbit, saving a considerable amount of money in constructing and launching the relay spacecraft.
The Report was more vague about possible robotic surface operations, suggesting that rovers or sample return missions might be dispatched to some proposed landing sites to investigate whether or not they were suitable for human missions, that fixed landers might carry prototype resource-processing payloads, that they might be used to investigate possible methods of mitigating dust impacts, or that they might be used for certain high-risk missions--one possibility mentioned in passing was a “rock climber” mission that would dangle an instrument package down one of the “skylights” found by LRP to investigate the interior of a lunar lava tube. Ultimately, however, the Report was palpably uncertain about the value of surface precursor missions compared to orbital ones, suggesting idea after idea but then stating that they needed further study before they could be accepted or rejected as part of the final plan.
As NASA moved from developing a plan to convincing the Bush Administration--not to mention Congress--to support it, other interests beyond the purely technical began to make themselves known in precursor planning. President Bush’s longstanding interest in foreign policy, coupled with the ongoing success of the Freedom collaboration, led to suggestions from the State Department, senior Administration officials, and the President himself that NASA pursue international cooperation in a return to the Moon. Outside of government, a variety of individuals and groups similarly proposed that Constellation include a substantial international component, ranging from Carl Sagan’s optimistic vision of joint American-Soviet missions with perhaps some European and Japanese contributions to more hardline or pessimistic views of mostly American missions with maybe a few instruments or devices from overseas. The Exploration Report itself had suggested that international collaboration be studied, but the Office of Exploration had largely considered such questions as falling beyond its competence, assuming generally that any mission would be basically American with perhaps some token international involvement. Now, the question of what form that involvement would take was rearing its head, and NASA began to reach out to ESA and ISAS to begin to answer. Tentative contacts were even made with Soviet space authorities, with whom President Bush had some idea of forging agreements to help prevent the spread of advanced weapons technology, but the chaotic environment of the slowly collapsing Soviet state prevented firm agreements from being made.
Encouraged by their important role in the construction of Space Station Freedom, both Europe and Japan insisted on playing more than a token role in the upcoming lunar missions, going beyond the modest limits set by the Office of Exploration. While neither had much appetite for replacing the most expensive and critical American contributions--the launch vehicle, the transport capsule, the lunar lander--they were more than willing to argue for Mitsubishi building lunar rovers or Zeiss building camera optics, important but relatively simple and cheap elements of the mission. Both also seized on precursor missions as an area where they could possibly make outsized contributions, digging up lunar mission proposals that their own scientists and engineers had made in the past and reworking them to fit in the framework of Project Constellation. A European proposal to build a small ion-propelled spacecraft as a technology demonstrator prior to the operational use of the engines, which had been forestalled by the approval of Piazzi as a major European mission, was resurrected and reworked as a pair of spacecraft for gravity mapping, for example, while a Japanese proposal to send a stretched version of their Halley probes was suggested as one method of investigating the scientific side of the dust question.
These efforts to secure an important place for its partners at the table intersected with growing discontent in Congress at the scale and cost of the proposed American dual-orbiter mission. Facing a dearth of missions beyond Cassini’s launch in 1994, JPL quickly went to work to secure its position in Project Constellation, trying to quickly set the mission design. The result was a “Christmas tree” of a complex probe with many instruments, able to address virtually every outstanding question possible, albeit at considerable expense. The same impulses that led Congress to reject “Option B” and a commitment to lunar bases in favor of cheaper sorties also led them to reject the inevitably costly JPL dual-orbiter mission. Offers by America’s allies to supply far less costly spacecraft to address some of its roles were a potent weapon in Congressional arguments against NASA’s spending; why shouldn’t NASA save $250 million here, $150 million there by taking them up on their offer, they asked? Under Congressional pressure, and with little Administration commitment to a particular architecture, NASA crumbled; the JPL orbiter was downscoped to address just two questions, that of the presence of water ice and landing site preparation, while the ESA and Japanese proposals were accepted as part of their contributions to the Artemis Program, much as they had contributed to Freedom.
Just as this agreement was hashed out, however, events conspired to force even more international work on NASA. The collapse of the Soviet Union had led to worries that, in the chaotic economic state of post-Soviet Russia, the advanced military technologies of the Soviets might be sold to rogue states or terrorists, allowing them to strike with ballistic missiles or even nuclear weaponry. These fears had been stoked by the deals made between the Russian space industry and India and China to provide technical assistance to the space programs of the latter two countries; while the transfer of technology to two nuclear-armed states already in possession of ballistic missile technology posed little risk of proliferation, it seemed an ominous sign to those in Washington and Brussels that the Russian arms industry might be overly morally flexible for their tastes. To forestall this possibility, European and American politicians agreed that they needed to inject their own funds into the Russian weapons industry, keeping scientists and engineers working on dual-use technologies gainfully employed rather than assisting Kim Il-Sung or those of his ilk in building ICBMs and nuclear warheads for them.
With spaceflight a major nexus of dual-use technologies, one significant arm of this effort was in ensuring the Russian space industry remained focused on satellites and launch vehicles. Despite Gore’s turn away from Mars, the joint Russian-American Fobos Together mission that had been proposed in the last year of the Bush administration as part of the Ares Program was steadily moving forwards, and efforts were made to find other areas of possible cooperation. As an ongoing and not yet entirely defined program, Artemis was the natural choice for the State Department to search for possible areas of cooperation between NASA and Roscosmos. Although a range of proposals were proposed, such as NASA use of the larger Vulkan variants for translunar launches or Russian-built surface habitats or hardware, attention quickly narrowed to simpler, more modest areas where the American and Russian programs could cooperate. One area highlighted by the discussions was in communications support; besides the Soviet deep-space communications network, which could be repurposed to support Artemis operations as an additional backup, the Soviet Union had developed and built its own communications satellite industry completely independently of the west, with attractively low costs compared to Western manufacturers. While some modifications would be needed to the equipment being developed for Artemis to allow relay through Russian satellites, given the early stage of design and construction these changes would be relatively straightforward, simple, and, therefore, cheap to implement. Along with the provision of engines for the lander upper stages, the Mesyat communications network, named after a lunar goddess of the pre-Christian Slavic religion, would be one of the largest contributions made by Russia to the Artemis Program, earning them a seat on one of the lunar flights, as with Europe and Japan.
Even as negotiations between the the two former adversaries were moving forwards, so too was development and construction of the precursors. The Richards-Davis report supported the division of labor that NASA had been implementing, finalizing the number of precursor probes at three: JPL’s imaging/ice spacecraft, ESA’s gravity mapper, and ISAS’ dust explorer. Other precursor proposals were discarded and left as little more than historical curiosities for those of a later age to wonder about, any scientific questions they might have addressed left for human missions to address.
With work on Cassini turning from construction to final launch preparations, JPL’s program hit the ground running with a fully engaged and ready workforce. With what were essentially two separate missions assigned to the same spacecraft and a hard deadline of 1997 for launch, so that the probe’s data could be fully processed and ready before it needed to be used for the actual Artemis missions, JPL was under a great deal of pressure to deliver on time and under budget, something its last several missions had had trouble with. While neither the optical side of the mission--imaging proposed landing sites in considerable detail to detect obstacles and build navigational charts for future landers to use--nor the ice side--integrating several different theoretical methods of detect water ice to avoid possible bias and error--posed any especially new problems to the laboratory, the pressure cooker environment and subordination to human spaceflight goals were new, or at least unwelcome reminders of a distant past they had done their best to shed since the 1960s.
Even as development was actually proceeding exceptionally smoothly, at least by the standards of planetary exploration, therefore, the mood around the lab was tense. As the biggest and most important project floating JPL, the Lunar Ice Observer, as it was known, occupied pride of place, but unlike its predecessors it was a tenuous and contested position. There was constant worry, especially from those not directly involved in the project, that LIO might be a Trojan Horse for tighter central control over the famously independent JPL, that it might represent the first stage in a decline of American planetary science--with the launch of Cassini and the MTRs in 1994, JPL had no independent planetary science missions in planning or development for the first time in decades--or other, more fantastic fears. These fears were further stoked, ironically, by the low-key nature of the technical challenges involved; solar power, minimal delta-V requirements, and short duration (by the standard of most of the lab’s recent missions, at least) provided no opportunity to really show off JPL’s technical prowess, and prove that it was still a valuable member of NASA.
Opportunity, however, was soon to come. Shortly before the demise of LRP in 1993, several of the mission’s scientists proposed a novel and, even better, cheap and quick method of checking whether the mission’s apparent detection of water ice in polar craters had been correct or a misinterpretation of a spurious signal, suggesting that the probe be deliberately targeted on one of the craters in question at the end of its mission. During its impact, it would churn up and vaporize a certain amount of material from the crater surface, among which might be some water ice, which in turn could be spectroscopically detected from telescopes on Earth trained on the Moon’s southern limb. As it would potentially add a significant amount of scientific value to the mission at virtually no extra cost, the mission modification was quickly approved, and LRP was duly crashed into a crater near the lunar south pole. Unfortunately, the results were negative, although supporters of the lunar ice hypothesis were quick to point out that many circumstances could have led to a negative reading; the crater targeted might not have had extensive ice deposits, for example, the deposits might be patchy and by chance the probe had not hit any of them, and so on and so forth. Rather than the conclusive end to the lunar ice debate that planners had hoped for, the experiment became just another datum for scientists to bicker about.
Nevertheless, LIO designers at JPL took note of the innovative approach, and quickly came up with their own method of using it. Rather than crash their spacecraft, which anyways had a lengthy mission of its own ahead of it, they would crash the transfer stage used to inject the probe on a translunar trajectory, much like later Apollo missions had done with their S-IVB stages. And, by shaving weight off of the main probe and taking advantage of the extra capabilities of the new Delta 5000, they would be able to include an extra, simple spacecraft on the stack, just enough to follow the transfer stage in and analyze the results from extreme close range before adding its own punch. This could help detect trace or faint signals of water ice in the plume that might otherwise elude Earth-based telescopes, not to mention widening the selection of target craters and improving targeting precision.
When LIO launched aboard a Delta 5000 in late 1997, this subsidiary probe, now named the Ballistics Lunar Analysis SpacecrafT, or BLAST, tagged along, mounted on the tip of the Centaur transfer stage. After putting LIO on a lunar transfer trajectory, BLAST, together with the Centaur, separated and adjusted their course, looping around the Moon as LIO put itself into orbit to optimize their eventual impact trajectory. A few weeks after launch, after several more gravity assist passages, BLAST separated from the Centaur as it neared the Moon, this time bound not for a fly-by but for impact. As the Centaur itself hit, LIO itself rose up above the lunar horizon to watch as BLAST flew through the plume and then into the Moon itself in a bit of choreography that had been arranged through the multiple lunar flybys to provide the best data possible for scientists on Earth. Unfortunately, that data, again, failed to definitively end the debate. While NASA claimed significant evidence for water in their observations, skeptical outsiders questioned their conclusions, a matter not helped by the smaller than expected plume, which was only just detected by the largest Earth-based telescopes trained on the predicted impact site. With no corroborating data from outside parties, it was up to LIO itself or, as a last resort, the Artemis missions to finally show whether or not ice really exists on the Moon.
LIO delivered. Besides a powerful built-in SAR array, designed to help overcome the problems with LRP’s bistatic radar experiments, LIO carried an array of particle spectrometers designed to extend and supplement LRP’s observations, particularly by detecting hydrogen, one of the elements that make up water. Since hydrogen is rare in lunar regolith, while oxygen is highly abundant, any areas of concentration would be of interest even if the hydrogen was not bound up in ice deposits, although water ice was the most likely and plausible method of binding large amounts of hydrogen. During repeated passes over shadowed craters identified during LRP’s mission, these spectrometers discovered significant evidence of large concentrations of hydrogen, and therefore water ice, along with very unexpected findings that seemed to indicate a relatively large amount of hydrated, or water-bearing, minerals on the lunar surface, especially around the poles. Concurrent investigations on material from the Apollo missions, especially Apollos 15, 17, and 18, which visited formerly volcanically active areas, showed that previous studies had grossly underestimated how hydrated lunar interior materials could be, providing substantial evidence of volatile presence in ancient glass spheres from lunar fire fountains. In fact, these results seemed to indicate, the Moon’s interior is about as volatile-rich as Earth’s, with expected primordial abundances in the material similar to those found in basalts erupting from Earth’s mid-ocean ridges.
In parallel with these studies, LIO was producing other useful work, with the radar array being used also to characterize the radar appearance of possible landing areas and other regions for later use, not only in support of landings but also to improve knowledge of the lunar near-surface and its properties under radar illumination, to avoid possible future misinterpretations of radar data. The camera, of course, was providing hugely detailed imagery of great swathes of the surface around possible landing sites and other locations of interest, extending LRP’s imaging of the the landing sites of the Apollo, Surveyor, and Luna missions. And with LIO’s other results, these possible landing sites were increasingly clustered around the poles, which had become the top scientific targets for Artemis missions. Indeed, four of the five top scientific objectives of the Artemis missions, on the brink of finally launching, were directly or indirectly related to absolutely confirming and characterizing the lunar ice deposits LIO and LRP had discovered. While JPL was still wary about becoming too involved in the human program, LIO still stood as a significant and very public success even as Cassini continued to wind its way towards Saturn and Liberty continued to hang from its lander-delivery platform on Mars.
In parallel with JPL’s work on LIO, engineers and scientists in Japan and Europe were developing their own spacecraft. With considerably more experience in planetary exploration than ISAS, ESA’s GRavity and Interior Magma Analysis at Long Distance Investigation, or Grimaldi, after one of the originators of the modern system for naming lunar features, Francesco Maria Grimaldi, was progressing much more smoothly than its Japanese counterpart SELENE, despite the relative technical simplicity of the latter probe. The modifications needed to the probe body to survive the considerably different thermal environment of low lunar orbit, not to mention the significant structural changes necessary to support the planned instrument package, were becoming more difficult than anticipated, while it was increasingly clear that the Japanese budgetary situation would never again be as free and liberal as it had been during the 1980s. These factors combined to cause repeated problems for the Japanese spacecraft, worrying mission planners in Houston and Washington D.C. who wanted the information on the lunar dust environment that it would provide to help guide their design of key surface equipment such as space suits and airlocks. Scientists interested in the data it would provide were also worried that it might be delayed, and ultimately unable to sample a relatively pristine, human-free lunar atmosphere, decreasing the utility and scientific value of its results. Nevertheless, the Japanese continued plugging along without significant outside support, diverting resources from other, less critical programs towards SELENE to ensure that it launched on time.
In any case, the problems the Japanese were having with SELENE paled in comparison to the ones the Russians were having with their communications satellites, probably the most important of all the precursor spacecraft. Unlike the others, these were an absolute requirement for human landings at many of the proposed Artemis mission sites, and would be needed at least before the launch of any farside, polar, or limb missions. While Russia certainly had the technical expertise and historical experience to build such spacecraft, the difficult financial state of their space program made it hard for them to bring that experience and expertise to bear, and NASA was repeatedly forced to beg Congress to appropriate more funds to assist Roscosmos in ensuring the satellites were built on time, at the same time it was being forced to increase appropriations for the joint Fobos Together mission. While nonproliferation concerns continued to weigh heavily in Congressional minds, especially after 1994, of greater weight was the simple fact that it was too late for the United States to change course. Having assigned responsibility for the communications network to Russia, it would now be slower and more expensive to begin development of an American alternative to the Russian system than it would be to simply cough up the necessary funds for accelerating Mesyat development.
Nevertheless, cost overruns in Mesyat had consequences. In an effort to shave expenses, Congress repeatedly considered making up the difference by cutting the budget of other NASA programs, with Fobos Together being a particularly popular target. While these cuts were staved off by narrow margins--in one case, in fact, the Senate failed to pass an amendment which would have canceled the program altogether by only a single vote--they were fuel to the fire for the program’s already troubling issues, significant contributing to its later issues. In the end, though, Fobos Together, like Mesyat, would continue, Russia too vital a partner and the problems at hand too important to allow temporary concerns to override sound diplomacy.
As budgetary conflicts and technical issues were challenging two of Artemis’ international partners, though, the third was racing ahead. Only a few months after LIO, the Grimaldi probes left Kourou aboard a Europa 4 in a picture-perfect launch towards the Moon. Quickly settling themselves into a close lunar orbit, they immediately set to work, using a high-precision data link between the two spacecraft to track the tiny changes in distance induced by lunar gravity. As accurate on the far side as the near, within a year Grimaldi had produced a revolutionary new gravity map of the lunar surface, far more detailed than any ever previously created. This data would not only inform mission planners of useful, stable orbits to use during transfers between the lunar surface and EML-2, but also had tremendous scientific value. As on Earth, it could be used to trace the Moon’s subsurface structure, and within months of the release of the first version of the Grimaldi map, it had already begun to help scientists better understand the history of lunar impacts by describing the subsurface structure of major lunar impact basins. As the Moon is a key point of reference for describing conditions across the early inner solar system, this work had implications for research involving Mercury, Venus, Mars, and even the asteroid belt, besides the Moon and Earth themselves.
Towards the end of the year, Japan’s SELENE, now renamed Kaguya after the well-known moon princess of Japanese legend, joined the growing constellation at the Moon after launch atop a Japanese Mu-IV rocket, a new solid fuel vehicle growing out of their efforts to develop a domestic capability to build the boosters used by the H-1 and new H-II rockets. Despite its relatively simple and small instrument loadout, Kaguya would be the last and in some ways the most important piece of the scientific puzzle, addressing the long-standing dust issue. While it could not, of course, measure dust levels at the lunar surface, it could still indirectly answer important questions about dust behavior. Kaguya’s scientific results could also answer important questions about the behavior of the atmosphere and dust of other solar system bodies, particularly those like Mercury, Triton, or many of the other moons of the outer solar system with no more than a very tenuous envelope of gases. It discovered significant levels of charged dust at low altitude near the terminator, explaining certain curious observations by the Apollo astronauts, as well as studying the composition of the dust (similar to the surface regolith) and the thin lunar atmosphere. Despite the relatively limited results, it still provided information valuable to the manufacturers of the equipment that would be used on the Moon and marked an important step forwards for the Japanese space program as only their second beyond Earth orbit mission.
Besides these three successes, 1997 had one final piece of good news for the Artemis program; in December, the first set of the Mesyat satellites to launch had finally arrived at Baikonur. While check-out and mating with their Vulkan launch vehicle would delay their arrival at the Moon until April of 1998, this marked a welcome piece of good news for mission planners anxiously awaiting Mesyat’s deployment. By early 1999, the five satellites of the Mesyat network--four primaries in a halo orbit around EML-2 and a fifth on-orbit spare--had been delivered, providing global communications coverage to the lunar surface.
Altogether, as the millenium wound to a close, a new era of the “armada” was dawning. Unlike the “comet armada” of 1986, or the Mars and Venus concentrations of an earlier era, though, this had been planned, and each element was part of a greater whole. Russian communications, European gravity observations, Japanese dust research, and American imaging and spectroscopy were all working together, each contributing . And behind them, as the last year of the 20th century began, were humans: building hardware, studying landing sites, and practicing for extended missions on the lunar surface.
It had been a long time. But they were returning.
hammer post, I love it
on Japan problem it's based on collapse of there Bubble Economy in 1992.
Question on Grimaldi
Launch by Europa 44a, will the Astrid stage inject Grimaldi into lunar orbit ?
on Japan problem it's based on collapse of there Bubble Economy in 1992.
Question on Grimaldi
Launch by Europa 44a, will the Astrid stage inject Grimaldi into lunar orbit ?
A lengthy entry
But I probably enjoyed this one the most so far out all in Part III.
But I probably enjoyed this one the most so far out all in Part III.
I have to agree
Looks like everyone here has money problems of some sort. NASA Budgetary Battles, ESA Budgetary Allocations and Direction. Russian and Japanese Finance Woes.
And all while struggling to determine if there's water on the Lunar Surface at all. That said, things really are moving along now with a proper communication relay for EML2, and swathes of new data of the Lunar Environment to not only determine what's needed to get the risks down, but also to pick out the best possible sights for when they start sending Crews.
And with all that said, I'm going to take a wild guess here, and say that those exploring the near-side of the Moon might have an easier time psychologically speaking, having a familiar Earth visible to them for most of their stay time depending on timing.
Looks like everyone here has money problems of some sort. NASA Budgetary Battles, ESA Budgetary Allocations and Direction. Russian and Japanese Finance Woes.
And all while struggling to determine if there's water on the Lunar Surface at all. That said, things really are moving along now with a proper communication relay for EML2, and swathes of new data of the Lunar Environment to not only determine what's needed to get the risks down, but also to pick out the best possible sights for when they start sending Crews.
And with all that said, I'm going to take a wild guess here, and say that those exploring the near-side of the Moon might have an easier time psychologically speaking, having a familiar Earth visible to them for most of their stay time depending on timing.
It's not nearly as big as you think it is, I suspect. A 44a could carry something like 3.3 tons to LLO using the Astris for the final insertion burn, but Grimaldi's twin probes are a lot like NASA's GRAIL mission--a ton together, if that. Given that mass, they can fly on a bare E40, doing their insertion burn themselves--no Astris needed even on ascent. I'll try to pin down a specific mass range, but that's about where they are.
EDIT: Checked with Goblin, and it's confirmed. Grimaldi's two probes fit into the 650 kg to 1.5 ton range that E40 serves, so no need for a E40a and no Astris used.
Thank you both, I happen to agree. Getting to work with Workable Goblin on stuff like this is one thing I've really enjoyed about Eyes over the years (feels rather odd to be able to say "years"). Also note he uses shorter paragraphs than mine.
Quite. I guess this might be one of the primary theses of Eyes when you get right down to it: you can do amazing things on what we've come to think of as "restricted" space budgets, provided you're smart in how you spend it.
On the water question, they're in about the same boat we are IOTL right now--we've had enough orbiter data that we're pretty sure there's probably some, but the only way to know for sure is ground truth: stick in a shovel or a core sampler and find out. Lunar geologists in this TL, though, have the promise of that ground truth coming much faster on the heels of their discoveries than it looks likely to be in our own, sadly.
Last edited:
Hello everyone. After a brief break, here's another illustration update, looking at the various precursor probes paving the way for a human return to the Moon. First up, the largest and most complex probe, the LIO.
Japan's little Kaguya probe might be small, but it has a vital role to play in making sure future astronauts won't suffer death by dust.
And tying things together, the Russian L2 commsat constellation keeps the components of Constellations of Exploration in constant contact with concerned controllers.
Great update, by the way! It's good to see the international cooperation involved in Artemis.
One thing I noticed was ISAS leading the Japanese efforts. I must admit I had to Google this agency, as I'd never heard of them before! Apparently the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science was in charge of Japan's space probes before being merged with NASDA and NAL (National Aerospace Laboratory) into JAXA in 2003 IOTL. I wonder if ISAS will be similarly subsumed ITTL?
One thing I noticed was ISAS leading the Japanese efforts. I must admit I had to Google this agency, as I'd never heard of them before! Apparently the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science was in charge of Japan's space probes before being merged with NASDA and NAL (National Aerospace Laboratory) into JAXA in 2003 IOTL. I wonder if ISAS will be similarly subsumed ITTL?
I would think so, the 1990's for Japan were especially harsh. Given that their economy was barely growing - when it wasn't tanking - combined with the dreaded Deflation they suffered throughout it, they absolutely HAD to cut their costs in everything if they wanted to keep it going.
For them, that meant cutting everything out of their Space Programme that wasn't absolutely essential, which meant the loss of their Manned Space Programme as an obvious first Cut. In fact, IOTL, AFAIK they were barely able to pull together the cash needed to get their H-II for the ISS built!
In addition, merging all their separate agencies into a single being - JAXA - I suspect would've seen a notable trimming in at least some of their overhead costs, along with clearer lines of responsibility IMHO.
In other news, really do love them images!
They really do help to bring this TL to life!beautiful Art work
Russian L2 commsat Mesyat
His GEO cousin Ekspress
sadly my Artwork got again sabotage by my boss and colleague, who dropping sick and I jump in to save day with donkeywork...
Russian L2 commsat Mesyat
His GEO cousin Ekspress
sadly my Artwork got again sabotage by my boss and colleague, who dropping sick and I jump in to save day with donkeywork...
Great work as always, Nixonshead.
Can't wait to see what you do with the Constellation hardware.
Can't wait to see what you do with the Constellation hardware.
Having a good look at the four types of craft is really nice because it gives some insight into how each goes about carrying out its mission.
LIO is clearly a radar/camera bus for instance.
The major task of the Grimaldi twins is to track each other as closely as possible; both are in essentially the same orbit, so the small variations in their relative speed and location from the ideal ellipse give an integration of the gradients due to non-ideal mascons, once perturbations are factored in--but those would tend to operate on both craft almost alike, so most of the discrepancy in their relative motions is due to the mascons. Hence their relatively simple, almost cubic, structure I guess. I suppose that as the structure of the mascons is inferred in ever greater detail, Earth uploads a finer set of orbital models and until the limits of resolution of their sensors are reached the model gets more and more refined.
I'm a little puzzled by one detail of Mesyat--I can't figure why the solar panels have a big gap between the center body and the inner edge of the panel. Why that big strut holding them out? Will the main body and/or antennae shadow the inner panel too much, or what? I note the other Russian geosynch satellite Michel offered for comparison doesn't have that gap.
On the other hand, while those panels look pretty big, it seems clear enough why; the comsats have to relay signals between different points on the moon (presumably they also will work to handle traffic between various other Lunar orbiters) and then relay them all to Earth. EM L-2 itself is very very far out there, and these two are going to be moving in wide halo orbits that put at least one of them off to the side enough to get line of sight to Earth, so the satellites are considerably farther from Luna than an Earth geosynch (or Molynia) satellite is, and then that distance almost adds linearly to their distance from Earth. Having a lot of power available is a good idea; their signal to and from Earth will be something like 1 percent of the power an identical geosynch would convey across its much shorter distance! The distance from the Lunar surface, though significantly greater than Earth geosynch, is in the same ballpark so more or less standard equipment suffices for Lunar communications with the satellites. Still, putting extra power in the satellites means lighter, less powered equipment on the Moon gets the job done, and that's good.
I wonder again why L-1 is being so completely neglected though! While the two existing Mesyats do a great job of opening up the Farside for exploration, surely Artemis will have at least some missions to Nearside as well. In a pinch, they will always be in direct LOS to Earth itself of course. But I still think it would be smart, and probably cost-effective, to have a third, reconfigured Mesyat in a tight halo orbit around L-1; that gives much closer coverage of Nearside with a much stronger signal and a greatly reduced signal time lag--not of course between Lunar operations and ground control, but point to point on Nearside.
I guess that there isn't much thought being given as yet to operations at more than one point at a time on the Moon, and that Nearside missions will just communicate directly with powerful antennae on Earth, or with the deep space communications network in orbit around Earth. When there is ever a plan to have two things happening at once in two different places on the Moon, I guess then would be the time to think about an L-1 relay comsat?
I get the least insight into the how of the mission for Kaguya. What exactly does it take to observe the Lunar dust and test the theory that it is suspended with electromagnetic forces? I'd have thought to try to measure those directly the thing would be festooned with long antenna spikes like a balding sea urchin, but none of that is in evidence, so I guess it is kind of hopeless to try to observe the EM gradients directly, desirable as that would be. Instead it is a rather compact and simple drum structure, so I suppose the name of the game is to try to observe the dust directly, in visual, infrared, maybe UV frequencies, so there are cameras. I don't know if the white square things on the gold foil are some kind of observational instrument or if they are just part of the craft's thermal controls.
Anyway it's quite exciting to imagine the three types of probe in operation all at once, coordinated by the Russian comsats. Presumably each of them is designed to factor in supplementary data from the others; thus the comsats help Grimaldi track the combined location of the two while they focus on tracking the variation of their separation; LIO might be able to observe the same part of the Moon Kayuga is looking at from time to time, and so on. The exact orbital elements of each, being tracked by the Mesyats (which are very far away from the mascons and should be orbiting almost exactly as though Luna were a point mass themselves) will supplement the information Grimaldi is gathering and do so with more utility the more refined the gravimetric map of Luna becomes; this in turn will lead to more sophisticated guidance of the whole constellation to economize on corrective thrusters while more elegantly navigating to desired targets. By the time the first Artemis mission is launched the mission can be planned around very fine detailed knowledge of the lunar mascons, which might have a bearing on the craft's trajectory to its desired L-2 halo orbit (and on the choice of that halo orbit's parameters) and surely will be relevant, at least somewhat, to the trajectory of the lander going to and returning from the Lunar surface.
LIO is clearly a radar/camera bus for instance.
The major task of the Grimaldi twins is to track each other as closely as possible; both are in essentially the same orbit, so the small variations in their relative speed and location from the ideal ellipse give an integration of the gradients due to non-ideal mascons, once perturbations are factored in--but those would tend to operate on both craft almost alike, so most of the discrepancy in their relative motions is due to the mascons. Hence their relatively simple, almost cubic, structure I guess. I suppose that as the structure of the mascons is inferred in ever greater detail, Earth uploads a finer set of orbital models and until the limits of resolution of their sensors are reached the model gets more and more refined.
I'm a little puzzled by one detail of Mesyat--I can't figure why the solar panels have a big gap between the center body and the inner edge of the panel. Why that big strut holding them out? Will the main body and/or antennae shadow the inner panel too much, or what? I note the other Russian geosynch satellite Michel offered for comparison doesn't have that gap.
On the other hand, while those panels look pretty big, it seems clear enough why; the comsats have to relay signals between different points on the moon (presumably they also will work to handle traffic between various other Lunar orbiters) and then relay them all to Earth. EM L-2 itself is very very far out there, and these two are going to be moving in wide halo orbits that put at least one of them off to the side enough to get line of sight to Earth, so the satellites are considerably farther from Luna than an Earth geosynch (or Molynia) satellite is, and then that distance almost adds linearly to their distance from Earth. Having a lot of power available is a good idea; their signal to and from Earth will be something like 1 percent of the power an identical geosynch would convey across its much shorter distance! The distance from the Lunar surface, though significantly greater than Earth geosynch, is in the same ballpark so more or less standard equipment suffices for Lunar communications with the satellites. Still, putting extra power in the satellites means lighter, less powered equipment on the Moon gets the job done, and that's good.
I wonder again why L-1 is being so completely neglected though! While the two existing Mesyats do a great job of opening up the Farside for exploration, surely Artemis will have at least some missions to Nearside as well. In a pinch, they will always be in direct LOS to Earth itself of course. But I still think it would be smart, and probably cost-effective, to have a third, reconfigured Mesyat in a tight halo orbit around L-1; that gives much closer coverage of Nearside with a much stronger signal and a greatly reduced signal time lag--not of course between Lunar operations and ground control, but point to point on Nearside.
I guess that there isn't much thought being given as yet to operations at more than one point at a time on the Moon, and that Nearside missions will just communicate directly with powerful antennae on Earth, or with the deep space communications network in orbit around Earth. When there is ever a plan to have two things happening at once in two different places on the Moon, I guess then would be the time to think about an L-1 relay comsat?
I get the least insight into the how of the mission for Kaguya. What exactly does it take to observe the Lunar dust and test the theory that it is suspended with electromagnetic forces? I'd have thought to try to measure those directly the thing would be festooned with long antenna spikes like a balding sea urchin, but none of that is in evidence, so I guess it is kind of hopeless to try to observe the EM gradients directly, desirable as that would be. Instead it is a rather compact and simple drum structure, so I suppose the name of the game is to try to observe the dust directly, in visual, infrared, maybe UV frequencies, so there are cameras. I don't know if the white square things on the gold foil are some kind of observational instrument or if they are just part of the craft's thermal controls.
Anyway it's quite exciting to imagine the three types of probe in operation all at once, coordinated by the Russian comsats. Presumably each of them is designed to factor in supplementary data from the others; thus the comsats help Grimaldi track the combined location of the two while they focus on tracking the variation of their separation; LIO might be able to observe the same part of the Moon Kayuga is looking at from time to time, and so on. The exact orbital elements of each, being tracked by the Mesyats (which are very far away from the mascons and should be orbiting almost exactly as though Luna were a point mass themselves) will supplement the information Grimaldi is gathering and do so with more utility the more refined the gravimetric map of Luna becomes; this in turn will lead to more sophisticated guidance of the whole constellation to economize on corrective thrusters while more elegantly navigating to desired targets. By the time the first Artemis mission is launched the mission can be planned around very fine detailed knowledge of the lunar mascons, which might have a bearing on the craft's trajectory to its desired L-2 halo orbit (and on the choice of that halo orbit's parameters) and surely will be relevant, at least somewhat, to the trajectory of the lander going to and returning from the Lunar surface.