Tag: lunar missions
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India’s Chandrayaan-3 Lands on the Moon!
Congratulations to the Indian Space Research Organization for the successful landing of the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft on the moon! This is the first spacecraft to land near the Lunar South Pole. The spacecraft includes a rover. The spacecraft will return information that will help future missions.
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Spacecraft Control Toolbox To The Moon
Today, I will discuss two functions in release 2020.1 of the Spacecraft Control Toolbox (SCT) which can be used to get your spacecraft into a lunar orbit. They are LunarTargeting.m and LunarMissionControl.m. They are demonstrated together in the script LunarMission.m. LunarTargeting.m produces a transfer orbit that starts at a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) altitude and…
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Optical Navigation to the Moon
There is great interest in lunar missions. The U.S. plans to land astronauts on the moon in this decade. Several commercial companies are working on landers. Many other national space programs are working on their own landers and rovers. As with all spacecraft, you need to know where you are. The traditional way is to…
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Artemis: From Gateway to Low Lunar Orbit
One concept Gateway may be in a polar orbit with an apolune of 70,000 km and perilune of 3,000 km. One concept is for the lander and Orion to meet at Gateway. Our alternative is for Artemis to stay in a low lunar orbit and be met there by Orion, the cargo transfer vehicle and…
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Artemis: NASA RFP for Lunar Landers
NASA recently released a request for proposal for a lunar lander with a due date of November 1. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/fast-track-to-the-moon-nasa-opens-call-for-artemis-lunar-landers NASA would like a crew to land on the moon by 2024. We didn’t have time to write a proposal, but here is our design. We propose a single stage vehicle, that can land from and…
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NASA SBIR Phase III: Low Energy Mission Planning
Hello PSS fans! This is Charles Swanson, recently minted doctor of plasma physics and PSS’s newest employee. It’s my distinct pleasure to discuss our most recent NASA contract: A Phase III SBIR to integrate our Low Energy Mission Planning Toolbox (LEMPT) into NASA’s open source Orbit Determination Toolbox (ODTBX). Have you read about the kinds…
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Lunar Landing Control System
The first soft moon landings were accomplished in the 1960’s by the Soviet Luna 9 and the U.S. Surveyor Spacecraft. These were followed by the U.S. Lunar Module landings during the Apollo program. The Soviets had their own LK Lander lunar lander for landing humans on the moon but it never flew. China’s Chang’e-3 landed on the moon on December 13,…
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Lunar Orbit Insertion Maneuver
New functions in the Lunar Cube module in 2016.1 allow you to easily plan lunar insertion and orbit change maneuvers. In the following pictures you can see a lunar orbit insertion from a hyperbolic orbit. In all figures the lunar terrain is exaggerated by a factor of 10. The same maneuver looking down on the…
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Heading to the Moon
We have transitioned our lunar lander work from the Spacecraft Control Toolbox to VisualCommander. Here is a simulation of the lander heading to the moon on the elliptical transfer orbit designed in our Landing on the Moon blog post. The model was discussed in our Moon Lander Design blog post. We exported it from the…
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Moon Lander Design
Our last post showed the mission planning script for our lunar lander. The next step was to layout the lander. We did this using the BuildCADModel function in the Spacecraft Control Toolbox. The propulsion system is designed to meet the requirements of the mission plan. We use six 1 N HPGP thrusters for attitude control…