Lunar lander

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Apollo Apollo Lunar Module-5 Eagle as seen from CSM-107 Columbia Apollo 11 Lunar Module Eagle in landing configuration in lunar orbit from the Command and Service Module Columbia.jpg
Apollo Apollo Lunar Module-5 Eagle as seen from CSM-107 Columbia

A lunar lander or Moon lander is a spacecraft designed to land on the surface of the Moon. As of 2024, the Apollo Lunar Module is the only lunar lander to have ever been used in human spaceflight, completing six lunar landings from 1969 to 1972 during the United States' Apollo Program. Several robotic landers have reached the surface, and some have returned samples to Earth.

Contents

The design requirements for these landers depend on factors imposed by the payload, flight rate, propulsive requirements, and configuration constraints. [1] Other important design factors include overall energy requirements, mission duration, the type of mission operations on the lunar surface, and life support system if crewed. The relatively high gravity (higher than all known asteroids, but lower than all Solar System planets) and lack of lunar atmosphere negates the use of aerobraking, so a lander must use propulsion to decelerate and achieve a soft landing.

History

1958–1976

The Luna program was a series of robotic impactors, flybys, orbiters, and landers flown by the Soviet Union between 1958 and 1976. Luna 9 was the first spacecraft to achieve a soft landing on the Moon on February 3, 1966, after 11 unsuccessful attempts. Three Luna Spacecraft returned lunar soil samples to Earth from 1972 to 1976. Two other Luna spacecraft soft-landed the Lunokhod robotic lunar rover in 1970 and 1973. Luna achieved a total of seven successful soft-landings out of 27 landing attempts.

The United States' Surveyor program first soft-landed Surveyor 1 on June 2, 1966, this initial success was followed by four additional successful soft-landings, the last occurring on January 10, 1968. The Surveyor program achieved a total of five successful soft landings out of seven landing attempts through January 10, 1968. Surveyor 6 even did a brief hop off the lunar surface.

The Apollo Lunar Module was the lunar lander for the United States' Apollo program. As of 2024, it is the only crewed lunar lander. The Apollo program completed six successful lunar soft-landings from 1969 until 1972; a seventh lunar landing attempt by the Apollo program was aborted when Apollo 13's service module suffered explosive venting from its oxygen tanks.

The LK lunar module was the lunar lander developed by the Soviet Union as a part of several Soviet crewed lunar programs. Several LK lunar modules were flown without crew in low Earth orbit, but the LK lunar module never flew to the Moon, as the development of the N1 Rocket Launch Vehicle required for the lunar flight suffered setbacks (including several launch failures), and after the first human Moon landings were achieved by the United States, the Soviet Union cancelled both the N1 Rocket and the LK Lunar Module programs without any further development.

2013–2023

The Chinese Lunar Exploration Program (also known as the Chang'e project) includes robotic lander, rover, and sample-return components; the program realized an initial successful lunar soft-landing with the Chang'e 3 spacecraft on 14 December 2013. As of 2023, the CLEP has achieved three successful soft-landings out of three landing attempts, namely Chang'e 3, Chang'e 4 and Chang'e 5. Chang'e 4 made history by making humanity's first ever soft-landing on the far side of the moon.

Israel's SpaceIL attempted a robotic lunar landing by its Beresheet lander on 4 April 2019; the attempt failed. As of 2023, SpaceIL has plans for another soft-landing attempt using a follow-up robotic lander named Beresheet 2.

India's Chandrayaan Programme conducted an unsuccessful robotic lunar soft-landing attempt on 6 September 2019 as part of its Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft with the lander crashing on the Moon's surface. [2] On 23 August 2023, the program's follow-up Chandrayaan-3 lander achieved India's first robotic soft-landing and later conducted a brief hop on 3 September 2023 to test technologies required for Indian lunar sample return mission called Chandrayaan-4. [3]

Japan's ispace (not to be confused with China's i-Space) attempted a lunar soft-landing by its Hakuto-R Mission 1 robotic lander on 25 April 2023. The attempt was unsuccessful and the lander crashed into the lunar surface. The company has plans for another landing attempt in 2024.

Russia's Luna-Glob program, the successor program to the Soviet Union's Luna program, launched the Luna 25 lunar lander on 10 August 2023; the probe's intended destination was near the lunar south pole, but on 19 August 2023 the lander crashed on the Moon's surface. [4]

Japan's Smart Lander for Investigating Moon made a successful lunar landing with wrong attitude, bleak signal bandwidth and even after losing one of its engines during descent but within 100 m (330 ft) of its landing spot on 19 January 2024. It carried two small LEV rovers on board deployed sepqrately, just before SLIM's touchdown. [5] It's landing made Japan the 5th country to soft land on the moon. [6] [7] [8]

2024

In January 2024, the first mission of the NASA-funded CLPS program, Peregrine Mission One, suffered a fuel leak several hours after launch, resulting in losing the ability to maintain attitude control and charge its battery, thereby preventing it from reaching lunar orbit and precluding a landing attempt. [9] The probe subsequently burnt up in Earth's atmosphere.

The second CLPS probe Odysseus landed successfully on 22 February 2024 [10] on the Moon, marking the United States' first unmanned lunar soft-landing in over 50 years. This mission is the first private-NASA partnership to land on the Moon and the first landing using cryogenic propellants. [11] [12] However, the mission experienced some anomalies, including tipping-over on one side on the lunar surface; an off-nominal initial lunar orbit, a non-functioning landing LIDAR instrument, and apparently low communication bandwidth. [13] Later it was revealed that, though it landed successfully, one of the lander's legs broke upon landing and it tilted up on other side, 18° due to landing on a slope, but the lander survived and payloads are functioning as expected. [14] EagleCam was not ejected prior to landing. It was later ejected on 28 February but was partially failure as it returned all types of data, except post IM-1 landing images that were the main aim of its mission. [15]

China sent Chang'e 6 on 3 May, which will conduct the first lunar sample return from the far side of the Moon. [16] This is China's second lunar sample return mission, the first was achieved by Chang'e 5 from the lunar near side 4 years ago. [17]

Landing outcomes

The following table details the success rates of past and on-going lunar soft-landing attempts by robotic and crewed lunar-landing programs. Landing programs which have not launched any probes are not included in the table; they are added as their initial robotic and/or crewed landers are launched from Earth.

The term landing attempt as used here includes any mission that was launched with the intent to land on the Moon, including all missions which failed to reach lunar orbit for any reason. A landing attempt by a spacecraft is classified as full success if it lands intact on the Moon and is situated in its designed orientation/attitude and fully functional, while a partial success occurs when a spacecraft lands intact on the Moon but its in-situ operations is compromised as a result of the landing process for any reason.

ProgramCountry/Orgs.Time-span [lower-alpha 1] TypeLanding attemptsFull successPartial successNotes
Luna Flag of the Soviet Union.svg USSR 1963-1976robotic277Historical program; Luna 25 is part of Luna-Glob
Surveyor Flag of the United States.svg NASA 1966-1968robotic75Historical program
Apollo Flag of the United States.svg NASA 1969-1972crewed76Historical program
N1/L3 Flag of the Soviet Union.svg USSR N/Acrewed00Historical program; 3 uncrewed T2K LK landers were tested in Earth orbit
Chang'e Flag of the People's Republic of China.svg CNSA 2013-presentrobotic33Landers/rovers, sample-returns, future ISRU
Beresheet Flag of Israel.svg spaceIL 2019-presentrobotic10
Chandrayaan Flag of India.svg ISRO 2019-presentrobotic21
Hakuto-R Flag of Japan.svg ispace 2022-presentrobotic10
Luna-Glob Flag of Russia.svg Roscosmos 2023-presentrobotic10Successor to the Soviet Luna programme.
JAXA Flag of Japan.svg JAXA 2023-presentrobotic101 SLIM (landed with off-nominal attitude) [18]
CLPS Flag of the United States.svg NASA 2024-presentrobotic201CLPS-1 Peregrine lander (spacecraft failure)
CLPS-2 Odysseus lander (landed on its side) [13]

Proposed landers and research craft

Uncrewed

Crewed

Research craft (earthbound)

Challenges unique to lunar landing

Landing on any Solar System body comes with challenges unique to that body. The Moon has relatively high gravity compared to that of asteroids or comets—and some other planetary satellites—and no significant atmosphere. Practically, this means that the only method of descent and landing that can provide sufficient thrust with current technology is based on chemical rockets. [22] In addition, the Moon has a long solar day. Landers will be in direct sunlight for more than two weeks at a time, and then in complete darkness for another two weeks. This causes significant problems for thermal control. [23]

Lack of atmosphere

As of 2019, space probes have landed on all three bodies other than Earth that have solid surfaces and atmospheres thick enough to make aerobraking possible: Mars, Venus, and Saturn's moon Titan. These probes were able to leverage the atmospheres of the bodies on which they landed to slow their descent using parachutes, reducing the amount of fuel they were required to carry. This in turn allowed larger payloads to be landed on these bodies for a given amount of fuel. For example, the 900-kg Curiosity rover was landed on Mars by a craft having a mass (at the time of Mars atmospheric entry) of 2400 kg, [24] of which only 390 kg was fuel. In comparison, the much lighter (292 kg) Surveyor 3 landed on the Moon in 1967 using nearly 700 kg of fuel. [25] The lack of an atmosphere, however, removes the need for a Moon lander to have a heat shield and also allows aerodynamics to be disregarded when designing the craft.

High gravity

Although it has much less gravity than Earth, the Moon has sufficiently high gravity that descent must be slowed considerably. This is in contrast to a small asteroid, in which "landing" is more often called "docking" and is a matter of rendezvous and matching velocity more than slowing a rapid descent.

Since rocketry is used for descent and landing, the Moon's gravity necessitates the use of more fuel than is needed for asteroid landing. Indeed, one of the central design constraints for the Apollo program's Moon landing was mass (as more mass requires more fuel to land) required to land and take off from the Moon. [26]

Thermal environment

The lunar thermal environment is influenced by the length of the lunar day. Temperatures can swing between approximately −250 to 120 °C (−418.0 to 248.0 °F) (lunar night to lunar day). These extremes occur for fourteen Earth days each, so thermal control systems must be designed to handle long periods of extreme cold or heat. [27] Most spacecraft instruments must be kept within a much stricter range of between −40 and 50 °C (−40 and 122 °F), [28] and human comfort requires a range of 20 to 24 °C (68 to 75 °F). This means that the lander must cool and heat its instruments or crew compartment.

The length of the lunar night makes it difficult to use solar electric power to heat the instruments, and nuclear heaters are often used. [23]

Landing stages

Achieving a soft landing is the overarching goal of any lunar lander, and distinguishes landers from impactors, which were the first type of spacecraft to reach the surface of the Moon.

All lunar landers require rocket engines for descent. Orbital speed around the Moon can, depending on altitude, exceed 1500 m/s. Spacecraft on impact trajectories can have speeds well in excess of that. [29] In the vacuum the only way to decelerate from that speed is to use a rocket engine.

The stages of landing can include: [30] [31]

  1. Descent orbit insertion – the spacecraft enters an orbit favorable for final descent. This stage was not present in the early landing efforts, which did not begin with lunar orbit. Such missions began on a lunar impact trajectory instead. [29]
  2. Descent and braking – the spacecraft fires its engines until it is no longer in orbit. If the engines were to stop firing entirely at this stage the spacecraft would eventually impact the surface. During this stage, the spacecraft uses its rocket engine to reduce overall speed
  3. Final approach – The spacecraft is nearly at the landing site, and final adjustments for the exact location of touchdown can be made
  4. Touchdown – the spacecraft achieves soft landing on the Moon

Touchdown

Lunar landings typically end with the engine shutting down when the lander is several feet above the lunar surface. The idea is that engine exhaust and lunar regolith can cause problems if they were to be kicked back from the surface to the spacecraft, and thus the engines cut off just before touchdown. Engineers must ensure that the vehicle is protected enough to ensure that the fall without thrust does not cause damage.

The first soft lunar landing, performed by the Soviet Luna 9 probe, was achieved by first slowing the spacecraft to a suitable speed and altitude, then ejecting a payload containing the scientific experiments. The payload was stopped on the lunar surface using airbags, which provided cushioning as it fell. [32] Luna 13 used a similar method. [33]

Airbag methods are not typical. For example, NASA's Surveyor 1 probe, launched around the same time as Luna 9, did not use an airbag for final touchdown. Instead, after it arrested its velocity at an altitude of 3.4m it simply fell to the lunar surface. To accommodate the fall the spacecraft was equipped with crushable components that would soften the blow and keep the payload safe. [29] More recently, the Chinese Chang'e 3 lander used a similar technique, falling 4m after its engine shut down. [34]

Perhaps the most famous lunar landers, those of the Apollo Program, were robust enough to handle the drop once their contact probes detected that landing was imminent. The landing gear was designed to withstand landings with engine cut-out at up to 10 feet (3.0 m) of height, though it was intended for descent engine shutdown to commence when one of the 67-inch (170 cm) probes touched the surface. During Apollo 11 Neil Armstrong however touched down very gently by firing the engine until touchdown; some later crews shut down the engine before touchdown and felt noticeable bumps on landing, with greater compression of the landing struts. [35] [36]

Notes

  1. ↑ "Time-span" in this case begins in the year that the relevant program launched its first lunar landing attempt.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Surveyor program</span> 1960s NASA program to soft-land robotic probes on the Moon

The Surveyor program was a NASA program that, from June 1966 through January 1968, sent seven robotic spacecraft to the surface of the Moon. Its primary goal was to demonstrate the feasibility of soft landings on the Moon. The Surveyor craft were the first American spacecraft to achieve soft landing on an extraterrestrial body. The missions called for the craft to travel directly to the Moon on an impact trajectory, a journey that lasted 63 to 65 hours, and ended with a deceleration of just over three minutes to a soft landing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Luna programme</span> Robotic spacecraft missions to the Moon by the Soviet Union (1958–1976)

The Luna programme, occasionally called Lunik by western media, was a series of robotic spacecraft missions sent to the Moon by the Soviet Union between 1959 and 1976. The programme accomplished many firsts in space exploration, including first flyby of the Moon, first impact of the Moon and first photos of the far side of the Moon. Each mission was designed as either an orbiter or lander. They also performed many experiments, studying the Moon's chemical composition, gravity, temperature, and radiation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Luna 15</span> 1969 Soviet space probe

Luna 15 was a robotic space mission of the Soviet Luna programme, that was in lunar orbit together with the Apollo 11 Command module Columbia.

<i>Luna 16</i> Soviet space probe

Luna 16 was an uncrewed 1970 space mission, part of the Soviet Luna program. It was the first robotic probe to land on the Moon and return a sample of lunar soil to Earth. The 101 grams sample was returned from Mare Fecunditatis. It represented the first successful lunar sample return mission by the Soviet Union and was the third lunar sample return mission overall.

<i>Luna 24</i> Soviet space probe

Luna 24 was a robotic probe of the Soviet Union's Luna programme. The 24th mission of the Luna series of spacecraft, the mission of the Luna 24 probe was the third Soviet mission to return lunar soil samples from the Moon. The probe landed in Mare Crisium. The mission returned 170.1 g (6.00 oz) of lunar samples to the Earth on 22 August 1976.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Apollo Lunar Module</span> NASA crewed Moon landing spacecraft (1969–1972)

The Apollo Lunar Module, originally designated the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), was the lunar lander spacecraft that was flown between lunar orbit and the Moon's surface during the United States' Apollo program. It was the first crewed spacecraft to operate exclusively in the airless vacuum of space, and remains the only crewed vehicle to land anywhere beyond Earth.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lander (spacecraft)</span> Type of spacecraft

A lander is a spacecraft that descends towards, then comes to rest on the surface of an astronomical body other than Earth. In contrast to an impact probe, which makes a hard landing that damages or destroys the probe upon reaching the surface, a lander makes a soft landing after which the probe remains functional.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Far side of the Moon</span> Hemisphere of the Moon that always faces away from Earth

The far side of the Moon is the lunar hemisphere that always faces away from Earth, opposite to the near side, because of synchronous rotation in the Moon's orbit. Compared to the near side, the far side's terrain is rugged, with a multitude of impact craters and relatively few flat and dark lunar maria ("seas"), giving it an appearance closer to other barren places in the Solar System such as Mercury and Callisto. It has one of the largest craters in the Solar System, the South Pole–Aitken basin. The hemisphere has sometimes been called the "dark side of the Moon", where "dark" means "unknown" instead of "lacking sunlight" – each location on the Moon experiences two weeks of sunlight while the opposite location experiences night.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moon landing</span> Arrival of a spacecraft on the Moons surface

A Moon landing or lunar landing is the arrival of a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon, including both crewed and robotic missions. The first human-made object to touch the Moon was Luna 2 in 1959.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sample-return mission</span> Spacecraft mission

A sample-return mission is a spacecraft mission to collect and return samples from an extraterrestrial location to Earth for analysis. Sample-return missions may bring back merely atoms and molecules or a deposit of complex compounds such as loose material and rocks. These samples may be obtained in a number of ways, such as soil and rock excavation or a collector array used for capturing particles of solar wind or cometary debris. Nonetheless, concerns have been raised that the return of such samples to planet Earth may endanger Earth itself.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Exploration of the Moon</span> Missions to the Moon

The physical exploration of the Moon began when Luna 2, a space probe launched by the Soviet Union, made a deliberate impact on the surface of the Moon on September 14, 1959. Prior to that the only available means of exploration had been observation from Earth. The invention of the optical telescope brought about the first leap in the quality of lunar observations. Galileo Galilei is generally credited as the first person to use a telescope for astronomical purposes; having made his own telescope in 1609, the mountains and craters on the lunar surface were among his first observations using it.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chinese Lunar Exploration Program</span> Lunar research program (2004 – present)

The Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, also known as the Chang'e Project after the Chinese Moon goddess Chang'e, is an ongoing series of robotic Moon missions by the China National Space Administration (CNSA). The program encompasses lunar orbiters, landers, rovers and sample return spacecraft, launched using the Long March series of rockets. A human lunar landing component may have been added to the program, after China publicly announced crewed lunar landing plans by the year 2030 during a conference in July 2023.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LK (spacecraft)</span> Soviet lunar module intended to be used in the Soviet lunar landing attempts

The LK was a lunar module developed in the 1960s as a part of several Soviet crewed lunar programs. Its role was analogous to the American Apollo Lunar Module (LM). Three LK modules, of the T2K variant, were flown without crew in Earth orbit, but no LK ever reached the Moon. The development of the N1 launch vehicle required for the lunar flight suffered setbacks, and the first Moon landings were achieved by US astronauts on Apollo 11. As a result, having lost the Space Race, both the N1 and the LK programs were cancelled without any further development.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rover (space exploration)</span> Space exploration vehicle designed to move across the surface of a planet or other celestial body

A rover is a planetary surface exploration device designed to move over the rough surface of a planet or other planetary mass celestial bodies. Some rovers have been designed as land vehicles to transport members of a human spaceflight crew; others have been partially or fully autonomous robots. Rovers are typically created to land on another planet via a lander-style spacecraft, tasked to collect information about the terrain, and to take crust samples such as dust, soil, rocks, and even liquids. They are essential tools in space exploration.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lunar rover</span> Vehicle that travels on the Moons surface

A lunar rover or Moon rover is a space exploration vehicle designed to move across the surface of the Moon. The Apollo program's Lunar Roving Vehicle was driven on the Moon by members of three American crews, Apollo 15, 16, and 17. Other rovers have been partially or fully autonomous robots, such as the Soviet Union's Lunokhods, Chinese Yutus, Indian Pragyan, and Japan's LEVs. Five countries have had operating rovers on the Moon: the Soviet Union, the United States, China, India, and Japan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chang'e 5</span> Chinese lunar exploration mission

Chang'e 5 was the fifth lunar exploration mission in the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program of CNSA, and China's first lunar sample-return mission. Like its predecessors, the spacecraft is named after the Chinese moon goddess, Chang'e. It launched at 20:30 UTC on 23 November 2020, from Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on Hainan Island, landed on the Moon on 1 December 2020, collected ~1,731 g (61.1 oz) of lunar samples, and returned to the Earth at 17:59 UTC on 16 December 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chang'e 6</span> Chinese lunar sample-return mission

Chang'e 6 is a robotic lunar exploration mission by the China National Space Administration. As China's second sample return mission, it will attempt to obtain a sample of soil and rock from the far side of the Moon. Like its predecessors in the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, the spacecraft is named after the Chinese Moon goddess Chang'e. It launched on 3 May 2024 and the mission is expected to last about 53 days.

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