Launches of robotic probes from various nations of the planet, missions with astronauts and even the first tourists who will travel away from Earth. The Moon is still the great protagonist of space exploration in 2024. The great return to the Earth’s natural satellite, unlike the race between the USA and Russia in the 1960s, is marked by many protagonists. And above all by private companies, which after having conquered Earth’s orbit, now travel further, towards the Selenic globe. As demonstrated by the first lunar mission of the year, whose launch is scheduled for tomorrow morning, from Cape Canaveral.
Peregrine, private lunar mission
The launch with the “Vulcan” carrier rocket, brand new and making its debut, is scheduled for 8.18 (Italian time) tomorrow morning, with a “launch window”, in which it will be possible to leave the same day, 45 minutes. And the mission of the lunar landing module “Peregrine”, finally and after many postponements, is about to take off from the large spaceport of Cape Canaveral. The mission is called Cert-1 and marks the official entry of private individuals into lunar programs, and created by the Astrobotic company. A private mission, but still carried out with financial support from NASA, which consists of an automatic lunar landing module, loaded with scientific (and not only) equipment.
The carrier rocket is on its first launch, and is the successor to the historic Atlas-Centaur and Atlas V of the US ULA. Real workhorses for space, they give way to this new carrier which is now ready at ramp number 41 at Cape Canaveral.
The planned lunar landing site for Peregrine is the Sinus Viscositatis, a region in the northern hemisphere of the Moon, chosen by Astrobotic with NASA planetologists. The main purpose is to transport six different scientific experiments of the American space agency, which allows Astrobotic and all the companies that are part of this lunar transport program (the CLPS – Commercial Lunar Payload Service) to sell any additional space present on the module of moon landing. In fact, on board Peregrine there will be another 15 scientific cargoes, coming from six different countries, both scientific and purely commercial. Peregrine thus brings a US vehicle back to the lunar surface: this hadn’t happened since December 1972 with the Apollo 17 lunar module and the astronauts Cernan and Schmitt. And it’s just the first step: in April it will be the turn of a second Astrobotic mission.
Italian remains and works of art
On board Peregrine there will not only be scientific equipment. When it enters lunar orbit on January 25, the upper stage of the Vulcan rocket, called “Centaur”, will be reignited to be positioned on a sun-synchronous orbit around the Sun. On it, there is a small capsule called Celestis Memorial Spaceflights deep space Voyager which contains the remains of some actors from the famous Star Trek series, as well as DNA samples of some former American presidents. And on board there will be one of the works of art that will travel the furthest. Certainly, one of the most “microscopic”. In fact, on a microchip there will be the works of the Turin artist Alessandro Scalo, creative director of Tembo, a branded commerce agency in Turin, created in collaboration with the associated agency Una – Aziende della Comunicazione Unite, the Migma group, with Alessandro Chiolerio and the researchers from the Italian Institute of Technology, who brought the artist’s sketches to life.
These are two nano lithographs of a few hundred nanometers (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter) made on two silicon chips measuring 1×1 millimeters. The first work, C’Moon, is a stylized representation of the artist’s right foot print. The second depicts a man with a smartphone: hence the title, Man with Smartphone. “It is curious to reflect on the fact that two artefacts of a few nanometers, essentially invisible, are, paradoxically, a macroscopic testimony to the success of Italian creativity and its international recognition, in particular of the surprising collaboration between art and scientific research” – explains Scali.
On the Moon the nano works will be housed inside the MoonArk, a sculpture no taller than 20 centimeters, with a total weight just over 250 grams, made up of four time capsules.