This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 7 October 2021. For other uses, see Lunar lander (disambiguation). This article is missing information about the science and engineering required to land a spacecraft on the Moon, along with examples of how they are approached in various lander projects.
A Lunar lander or Moon lander is a kind of lander (spacecraft) designed to conduct a moon landing.
To help NASA meet its new goal of getting to the Moon by 2024, longtime space contractor Lockheed Martin is unveiling new designs for a human lunar lander concept that can take people to and from the lunar surface. And the company says it can be ready within the next five years — as long as it has enough resources.
As the lunar lander moves up, it gets farther away from the camera. This means that the apparent size and the scale of motion should change. In the graph above, there is an assumed constant scale. Also, I should point out that once the spacecraft moves past the hills in the background the motion can no longer be tracked.
Its crew of two flew the complete lunar module from lunar orbit to the Moon's surface. During takeoff, the spent descent stage was used as a launch pad for the ascent stage which then flew back to the command module, after which it was also discarded....Apollo Lunar Module.SpecificationsStatusRetiredBuilt15Launched10Operational1039 more rows
During the nail biting 12.5 minute descent from lunar orbit, the LM's onboard computer (most critically needed during landing) shut down and recycled 5 times due to an erroneous checklist that had the crew turn on their ship's radar too early resulting in multiple data overloads.
The astronauts used Eagle's ascent stage to lift off from the lunar surface and rejoin Collins in the command module. They jettisoned Eagle before they performed the maneuvers that propelled Columbia out of the last of its 30 lunar orbits onto a trajectory back to Earth.
Several planned missions of the Apollo crewed Moon landing program of the 1960s and 1970s were canceled for a variety of reasons, including changes in technical direction, the Apollo 1 fire, hardware delays, and budget limitations.
A stray spark started the fire in the pure oxygen environment inside the module of Apollo 204, killing astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee of asphyxiation. Flaws in the design of the hatch door made it cumbersome and slow to open, meaning it was impossible to pull the astronauts out in time.
Images taken by a Nasa spacecraft show that the American flags planted in the Moon's soil by Apollo astronauts are mostly still standing. The photos from Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter (LRO) show the flags are still casting shadows - except the one planted during the Apollo 11 mission.
Aldrin retired from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1971 to become commandant of the Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California. In March 1972 he retired from the air force to enter private business.
After the crew re-boarded Columbia, the Eagle was abandoned in lunar orbit. Although its ultimate fate remains unknown, some calculations by the physicist James Meador published in 2021 showed that Eagle could theoretically still be in lunar orbit.
He said although Armstrong wasn't a “back-slapping, easy-to-get-along-with” kind of person, they were still friends. They became close while working on the Apollo mission, according to Aldrin.
Apollo 13 (April 11–17, 1970) was the seventh crewed mission in the Apollo space program and the third meant to land on the Moon. The craft was launched from Kennedy Space Center on April 11, 1970, but the lunar landing was aborted after an oxygen tank in the service module (SM) failed two days into the mission.
All of these factors — high costs, slow turnaround, few customers, and a vehicle (and agency) that had major safety problems — combined to make the Bush administration realize it was time for the Space Shuttle Program to retire.
The standard answer is that the last three Apollo missions were cancelled for budgetary reasons. That's NASA's official position: There were originally 3 more Apollo missions scheduled to fly to the Moon in the initial Apollo plan, all were cancelled due to budgetary constraints.
The lander is meant to travel to and from a new space station that NASA wants to build around the Moon called the Gateway. If all of these elements are created, ...
An artistic rendering of Lockheed Martin’s lunar landing concept that can supposedly get astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024. Image: Lockheed Martin. To help NASA meet its new goal of getting to the Moon by 2024, longtime space contractor Lockheed Martin is unveiling new designs for a human lunar lander concept that can take people to ...
Many of the elements needed for the vehicle are derived from Orion, a crew capsule that Lockheed has been working on for the last decade. Orion, which is nearing its first flight, is meant to fly astronauts into deep space and dock with the Gateway in the future.
After NASA achieves the coveted “boots on the Moon,” then the space agency will focus on its second phase of the lunar return: sustainability. That entails fleshing out the rest of the Gateway and using more reusable vehicles to go back and forth to the lunar surface.
This module is a cylindrical vehicle that rides into space along with the Orion, providing power and support during flight.
If current schedules hold, the Orion crew capsule and the service module will have flown together at least twice in space before a lander is needed in 2024.
Of course, Lockheed’s timeline for its proposed lander is dependent on NASA being able to finish the Gateway in time for 2024.
On January 3, 2019, the lander settled down in the South Pole-Aitken, which is a whopping 1,553 miles (2,500 kilometers) in diameter and is pockmarked with smaller craters. Researchers think that the impact that created the basin was big enough to penetrate deep into the moon's mantle and spew some of its minerals to the surface.
In the Von Kármán crater within the basin, the rover discovered iron- and magnesium-rich rock that had been ejected from the crater upon impact. In addition to low-calcium pyroxene and olivine, the material contained small amounts of high-calcium pyroxene, which is not otherwise found on the moon’s surface.
Understanding this process on the moon is important, Pinet wrote, because the moon has the same three-layer structure as Earth, but without the complications caused by plate tectonics (which Earth has but the moon lacks). "It is therefore of tremendous value for understanding the evolution of planetary interiors," Pinet wrote.
A Chinese mission to the far side of the moon may have unearthed the secrets of the moon's mantle. The mission sent a lander to the largest crater in the solar system, where an impact likely sent fragments of the mantle flying to the moon’s surface.
Planetary scientists suspect that the moon formed when an enormous impact threw huge amounts of material off of the early Earth. In the moon's early days, the satellite's entire surface would have been a molten magma ocean. In that ocean, minerals separated out by density, with lighter plagioclase rising to the top and heavier, ...
The new research may be the best look yet at the second layer of Earth’s natural satellite, which remains largely mysterious. The moon, like Earth, has a crust, mantle and core. The crust is made of plagioclase, or aluminum silicate, but the mantle's composition has remained mysterious — neither the U.S.
The soil tested by the visible and near-infrared spectrometer aboard the Yutu-2 rover shows patterns of light reflectance that indicate high levels of high-calcium pyroxeneand olivine, two minerals found in many igneous and metamorphic rocks and long-hypothesized to make up the moon's mantle. Olivine, which is abundant in Earth’s mantle, has previously been difficult to find on the lunar surface, though, researchers led by Chunlai Li of the National Astronomical Observatories at the Chinese Academy of Sciences wrote today (May 15) in the journal Nature.
The president's budget request seeks $24.8 billion for the coming fiscal year, a nearly 7 percent increase over the $23.3 billion in funding NASA received for the current fiscal year, ...
The president's budget request seeks $24.8 billion for the coming fiscal year, a nearly 7 percent increase over the $23.3 billion in funding NASA received for the current fiscal year, which ends on September 30. Congress will ultimately decide funding levels, of course, but this budget request is indicative of White House priorities.
The White House is seeking $7.9 billion for NASA's science programs, including Earth science and missions to explore the Moon and other planets. This represents a nearly 9 percent increase over last year's budget for science programs, with Earth science and planetary science receiving the most significant increases.
Lunar Lander was Atari's first vector graphic arcade game, which required the player to choose an area to land their ship on a lunar surface while contending with gravity and fuel all the while.
It is the player's duty to get their ship home to Earth, which is accomplished by making a safe landing on each moon. The player has to contend with their ship's fuel level, gravity (or lack thereof), wind factor, landscapes and/or even satellites in the later levels in order to land.
During a level, pressing pause, then buttons one and two and holding down button four on the controller will cause the lives indicator to increase.
Whenever the player makes a successful landing, a few bars of "The Star Spangled Banner" will play, and much more of the piece will play if the player can make it through all 31 levels and beat the game. Some of "Auld Lang Syne" will play at the "game over" screen as well.