Chandrayaan-3 successfully landed on the Moon. The Indian Space Research Organization’s mission successfully landed on the Moon’s southern polar region on Wednesday, making India the fourth country ever to land on the Moon. Next, a lander named Vikram and a rover named Pragyan will deploy to study this part of the Moon, which has never been studied up close. Pictured: A series of images captured by the spacecraft prior to landing. Image credit: ISRO.
Luna-25 wasn’t so lucky, crashing while preparing to land on the Moon. The Russian lunar mission was intended to land in the same area as Chandrayaan-3 two days earlier, but instead crashed when an orbit-lowering maneuver went awry. The mission would have been Russia’s first lunar landing since the Soviet era, and would have played a part in a broader Chinese-led lunar research program.
An orbital debris cleanup mission has been set back by a collision with other debris. The European Space Agency’s Clearspace-1 mission aimed to remove a large piece of debris from low Earth orbit as part of an overall cleanup effort, but that object is now in pieces after being struck by another, untracked object. This underscores the importance of orbital debris cleanup, since small, untrackable objects pose a threat to all other things in orbit, including active spacecraft and crewed vehicles.
Jim Burke, a true space pioneer, passed away this week at the age of 97. Jim Burke was the first manager of the United States’ first planetary exploration program: the Ranger missions that obtained the first close-up images of the lunar surface. He worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for many decades, making an unparalleled contribution to the exploration of the Cosmos. He was also deeply involved with The Planetary Society for many years, helping establish the Planetary Report magazine, leading many technical projects, and advocating for exploration. In this video from 2015, Jim shared some of his memories from the early days of the Society.