Weather finally cooperated and Japan’s space agency was able to launch its new x-ray telescope, XRISM, and lunar lander, SLIM. A lot is riding on both missions. The telescope is a replacement for one that broke apart in orbit several years ago and SLIM is the third Japanese attempt to land on the Moon in the past 10 months.
Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket is one step closer to launch today following a successful, if brief, engine test. A longer test is scheduled next month. Only then will European officials be ready to say when the inaugural launch will take place. For now, they will not even commit to the first half of 2024.
Here are links to all the articles published on SpacePolicyOnline.com last week, August 28-September 3, 2023, including our “What’s Happening in Space Policy” for this coming week. Click on each title to read the entire article.
India’s Chandrayaan-3 lunar probe has completed its primary mission and is now in sleep mode. The solar-powered Vikram lander and Pragyan rover were not designed to survive the lunar night, but were fully charged when darkness fell and India’s space agency hopes they might awaken when sunlight returns on September 22.
Another NASA mission to the International Space Station ended successfully just after midnight with the splashdown of Crew-6 off the coast of Jacksonville, FL. Two U.S. astronauts and one each from the United Arab Emirates and Russia spent 186 days in space, 184 of them on ISS conducting research and continuing the almost 23-year record of continuous permanent space station occupancy.
Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of September 3-9, 2023 and any insight we can offer about them. The Senate returns from summer break on Tuesday. The House remains in recess except for pro forma sessions until September 12.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted the likely crash site of Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft on the Moon. Luna-25 was intended to make a soft landing near the Moon’s South Pole, but a propulsion system failure caused it to crash instead. Russia published the coordinates of where it thought it crashed and LRO recently imaged the area.
NASA’s Small Bodies Assessment Group is encouraging NASA to find a way to send a spacecraft to study the asteroid Apophis before it reaches Earth in 2029. Apophis will come close enough for ground-based telescopes to get a good look as it whizzes by, but scientists want before and after measurements, too. Plans are already set for detailed in-space studies afterwards, but not before. One option is repurposing a pair of small spacecraft called Janus about to be put in storage even though they are built and ready to launch.
In a preview today of the imminent return of samples from the asteroid Bennu, NASA declared the next few months as “Asteroid Autumn.” The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is just one of three during that time period that will seek to enhance our understanding of asteroids — rocks in space left over from the formation of the Solar System. O-REx as it is fondly called is nearing the end of the first phase of its mission when samples collected from Bennu land in Utah on September 24.
Weather permitting, tomorrow the United States will launch the first satellites in a new system to keep track of what is happening in geosynchronous orbit. How many satellites are aboard the United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket is a secret as is the total number of satellites that will comprise the SILENTBARKER system, but the National Reconnaissance Office and the U.S. Space Force are publicly sharing some information to make the point to our adversaries that a state-of-the-art “watchdog” is on duty up there. [UPDATE: The launch has been postponed because of Tropical Storm Idalia.]