The American company United Launch Alliance (ULA) launched its new Vulcan Centaur rocket on Monday with the Peregrine module loaded with NASA instruments to analyze the surface of the Moon. As planned, the launch occurred at around 2:20 local time (8:20 Spanish peninsular time) from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida (USA). The event was broadcast live.
Peregrine is scheduled to land on the Moon on Friday, February 23 in a region on the far side of our satellite known in Latin as ‘Sinus Viscositatis’, which in English would mean something like sticky bay. There it will spend approximately 10 days collecting valuable scientific data, contributing to paving the way for the first woman and the first non-white person to explore our satellite, as part of the Artemis program for human return to the Moon. When it reaches its target, Peregrine will become the first American module to land on the lunar surface in over 50 years.
This is the first commercial robotic mission from the American agency that will land on the Moon. The final success of this project represents a step in the official certification of these rockets, the new and more powerful range from ULA. The Vulcan rocket carries the Astrobotic lunar lander Peregrine module. NASA will pay this company $108 million to transport five experiments to the Moon as part of the CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) program, which aims to reduce the cost of sending objects to the lunar surface.
The module carries scientific instruments from seven countries, including an “ambitious” Mexican mission with tiny robots to study the lunar surface. The robots were developed by the Space Instrumentation Laboratory of the Institute of Nuclear Sciences (LINX-ICN) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). They are explorers about 12 centimeters in diameter and weighing less than 60 grams, forming part of the Colmena project, the first lunar mission from this country. Each of the robots has wheels, sensors, and onboard computers that will allow them to explore the lunar surface and space mining. According to UNAM, the dimensions of these robots will place them mere centimeters from the lunar regolith surface, a dust formed by extremely fine, irregular, and abrasive grains.
The inaugural flight of ULA’s new range of launch vehicles, the Vulcan Centaur, was scheduled for December 24 and had to be postponed due to delays in the fueling test. United Launch Alliance (ULA) was founded in 2006 by Boeing and Lockheed Martin and its main activity until now has been launching high-security military payloads for the US Government. Their rockets were, until now, too expensive for most commercial customers, though very reliable. With Vulcan, ULA is now seeking a larger share of the commercial market.
For example, Amazon has already purchased 38 of the 70 planned launches for the so-called Project Kuiper, a constellation of communication satellites to provide fast and affordable internet to communities worldwide. On the other hand, the US Space Force wishes for two successful launches of Vulcan before putting any of their payloads onboard. Monday’s launch was the first. The second could take place in April and would carry the Dream Chaser, an unmanned spaceplane built by Sierra Space of Louisville (Colorado), on a cargo delivery mission to the International Space Station.
In addition to the cargo for NASA and scientific instruments, the Vulcan also carries the ashes and DNA samples of celebrities and prominent figures to “deep space”, such as hair from former US presidents George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, according to Celestis Memorial Spaceflights, a company specialized in space ‘burials’. They are joined by the remains and DNA samples of Gene Roddenberry and his wife Majel, both creators of Star Trek, as well as actors from this iconic TV series like Nichelle Nichols, DeForest Kelley, and James Doohan, and Douglas Trumbull, special effects creator in movies like ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’.
via: MiMub in Spanish
