Final preparations are underway at Cape Canaveral in Florida for a milestone mission to put an American lander on the moon, a feat not seen in more than 50 years since the end of the Apollo project.
Last-minute glitches aside, Peregrine mission one, named after the fastest animal on Earth, will roar into the sky on Monday at 07:18 UK time. After orbiting the planet, it will head to the moon and slide into lunar orbit before attempting to land shortly after local sunrise on February 23.
Even in the white-knuckle world of space exploration, the mission is considered risky. While Nasa instruments on board the robotic lander, it is a commercial operation. No private company has ever achieved a soft landing on the moon or any other celestial body.
“There’s a lot riding on it,” said John Thornton, the CEO of Astrobotic, the Pittsburgh firm leading the mission. “It’s a mixture of emotions. There’s excitement and thrill, but I’m also a little bit scared because there’s a lot at stake.”
Adding to the nerves is the fact that the Vulcan rocket Peregrine sits on has never flown before, even though its manufacturer, United Launch Alliance, has had a 100% mission success rate with its predecessor rockets.
Peregrine is the first mission to fly under Nasa’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, a new scheme in which the space agency pays private companies to deliver scientific equipment to the moon. Peregrine carries five NASA payloads and 15 others. One, a shoebox-sized rover from Carnegie Mellon University, is set to become the first American robot to orbit the moon.
“This whole task is not easy,” says Chris Culbert, the CLPS program manager at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre. “Landing on the moon is extremely difficult. We recognize that success cannot be guaranteed.”
Not all of the payloads are scientific: along for the ride is a copy of Wikipedia, a physical coin loaded with one bitcoin and DHL “moonboxes” that carry momentos ranging from novels and photographs to a small chunk of Mount Everest. Also on board, courtesy of space memorial firms Elysium Space and Celestis, were cremated human remains and DNA, some of which belonged to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.
The latter payloads in particular proved to be divisive. In a letter to Nasa, Buu Nygren, the president of the Navajo Nation, stressed that the moon is sacred to many indigenous cultures, and said depositing the material was “tantamount to desecration”. In response, Culbert emphasized that Peregrine was a commercial mission and that Nasa was in no position to tell Astrobotic what it could and could not fly.
Peregrine is tied to an ancient lava flow called Sinus Viscositatis, or the Bay of Stickiness, so named because the formations suggest that the lava had an unusual consistency. If all goes well, Peregrine’s instruments will measure radiation levels, surface and subsurface water ice, the magnetic field and the extremely thin layer of gas called the exosphere. The readings are expected to help reduce risks and utilize the moon’s natural resources when humans return to its surface.
“It’s high risk for sure, but we knew that when we got into this game,” said Simeon Barber, a senior research fellow at the Open University and the lead UK co-investigator on the Peregrine ion trap. mass spectrometer, or said. PITMS instrument, a mini-mass spectrometer that will sniff molecules as they bounce along the moon’s surface.
PITMS will analyze the composition of the lunar exosphere and monitor how it changes over the eight or so Earth days the lander will operate. Researchers hope to see the effect of natural cycles, such as temperature fluctuations from 100C to -100C, and the lander’s own activities. “We asked the rover team to do a donut to kick up some gases,” Barber said. “They said they would try.”
As a potential resource for future missions, water is a key molecule to find. PITMS can reveal how water molecules are released from the surface during the day and retrapped at night, shedding light on the circulation of lunar water.
Peregrine is just the first in a wave of landers destined for the moon under the CLPS scheme. The next, built by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, will launch in mid-February. It will take a more direct route to the moon and may even land before Peregrine.
While many scientists welcome the increase in commercial interest in the moon, some have questioned agreements to protect sites of special interest, such as potential future bases for lunar telescopes or gravitational wave detectors. “People need to think about this now,” says Prof Katherine Joy at the University of Manchester, a member of the Outlook science team, which will use a drilling and sampling instrument on a future CLPS mission to assess resources on the moon. “We are far from space mining, but companies are taking those first steps to understand where you are going and what technology you will deploy. We need to think about the regulatory framework before things move too fast.”
