The strange payloads on the first commercial US Moon landing
The first US mission to the Moon since 1972 carried some strange payloads alongside six scientific experiments for NASA.
IM-1 from Intuitive Machines is the first successful commercial landing on the Moon and follows a failed mission by Astrobotic of the US and a partially successful mission by Hakudo of Japan last month.
The Nova-C successfully landed at the South Pole of the Moon last night (22nd February 2024) but like the Hakudo mission has fallen over on landing. This is the first US mission back to the Moon since the Apollo missions which ended in 1972 and the toppling has cut the project short.
The original plan was for microsatellite called EagleCam was ejected from the lander before touchdown to capture images of landing. However this didn’t happen during the descent and the EagleCam has still to be launched. When this happens and the images are processed we will share those when they are made public.
- DARPA looks to monetise the Moon
- Two private Moon landings for early 2024
- Calamities and recoveries in space – updated
While the mission carried six scientific payloads for NASA as part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Scheme (CLPS), Intuitive took up some other payloads to plug the funding gap.
These included artwork by Jeff Koons, sportwear material, a prototype Lunar data centre for disaster recovery and a mini-observatory.
Columbia Sportwear is testing the limits of its materials by sending its Omni-Heat Infinity space blanket to the Moon. Thermal modeling showed that Omni-Heat Infinity provides a benefit for heat reflection when used as a panel covering, and that is where the technology will be used on Nova-C. Intuitive Machines engineers incorporated Columbia’s Omni-Heat Infinity thermal reflective technology onto NovaC’s A2 closeout panel to protect Nova-C’s cryogenic propulsion tank
Jeff Koons: Moon Phases comprises 125 unique artworks, each consisting of 3 components: a sculpture that will be installed on the Moon, a sculpture that will stay on the Earth, and an NFT that corresponds with the sculptures on the Moon and the Earth. The 125 miniature stainless steel Moon Phase sculptures will be displayed on the Moon in a cube, which was designed and built by 4Space in consultation with Koons.
The Lunaprise mission from Galactic Legacy Labs aims to establish a secure lunar repository as a long term archive to preserve human knowledge. The messages are called Lunagrams and can be submitted online as text, an image, or both. Music and video files are also accepted. An archive includes the English Wikipedia, The Rosetta Project, Long Now Foundation content, Project Gutenberg content, and other cultural archive datasets.
Separately, Lonestar is looking to send increasingly capable data centres to the Moon to meet the needs of its customers for secure premium data storage and edge processing. Lonestar’s Independence payload is a key technology demonstration of the company’s Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) on the Moon.
Working with Intuitive Machines, Lonestar is storing digital data on board the Nova-C lander for its customers and transmitting the first documents off planet for data storage to the Moon while in turn transmitting the first documents back from the Moon.
But there were also scientific payloads in the commercial operation.
ILO-X is a precursor to a flagship Moon South Pole Observatory ILO-1. The 600g instruments include a miniaturized dual-camera lunar imaging suite (one wide field and one narrow field) to capture some of the first images of the Milky Way Galaxy Centre from the surface of the Moon, as well as performing other celestial astronomy / Earth / local lunar environment observations.
Payload control
The systems in the lander were supplied by Aitech including its SP0-S space-rated single board computer, S740 radiation tolerant communications PMC board, and S730, a rugged space-rated SpaceWire card.
Aitech provided the complete conduction-cooled hardware for the Nova-C avionics system for use as both a payload controller and image data processor. Intuitive Machines used this dual SP0-S setup to respectively run both VxWorks RTOS and Linux to execute its time-critical software while processing video data streams down to a NAND flash storage module. This dual SBC system leverages RS-422, SpaceWire cameras, and NAND flash storage in an all-in-one space-rated avionics system.
Aitech’s space-rated SP0-S is a radiation-tolerant 3U CompactPCI SBC developed to handle high-performance processing and enhanced memory storage in orbit. Aitech’s SP0-S architecture supports up to seven additional cards on the CompactPCI backplane providing clock, arbitration, and interrupt servicing, including additional SP0-S SBCs as peripheral processors, as seen in the Nova-C lunar lander.
The S740 radiation tolerant communications PMC is designed with 16 input and 16 output differential channels of RS-422 and utilizes the onboard FPGA logic to interface to the external spacecraft sensors and devices. To reduce bottlenecks, the S740 is designed with a protected onboard PCI Bus DMA controller for input and output data packet buffering.
The radiation-tolerant S730 SpaceWire PMC Card offers three SpaceWire ports with initiator and target capability and has provisions to add on RS422 serial interfaces and 32 GPIOs for complete system communication.
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
