It drove straight in.

Russia's crashed Luna-25 spacecraft left a crater on the Moon, NASA images show.

"The new crater is about 10 metres in diameter," NASA said.

It is an old tradition that discoverers of new comets, asteroids, but also craters on planets and moons name them. Is there already a name for this big crater? Maybe a best name contest?

I put: "Tsar's Moonshot"

Russia still boasts the 16th-century Tsar Cannon, the largest one by caliber on earth. It is on display inside the Kremlin in Moscow, a perfect reflection of Russia's will vs. Russia's abilities:



btw.: The Tsar Bell, also the largest on earth, stands nearby...

Will the 3rd time be lucky?

Japan's 'Moon sniper' to test precision landing — and Tokyo's space ambitions.

Japan is aiming to become the fifth country to land a spacecraft on the lunar surface, with the launch of a low-cost "Moon sniper" that will test precision-landing technology designed to further Tokyo's space goals.

The launch comes weeks after India became the first country to land on the Moon's south pole, sparking an outpouring of national pride and highlighting a new space race that features the private sector.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission is scheduled to take off from Tanegashima Space Centre in southern Japan on Thursday, according to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which oversees launches for JAXA and builds the H-IIA rocket carrying the lander.

The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) craft — dubbed "Moon sniper" by JAXA — is set to touch down on the near side of the Moon close to Mare Nectaris, a lunar basin that is one of the visible dark spots on the Moon.

The mission is meant to demonstrate Japan's ability to put a lightweight, low-cost craft on the Moon within 100 metres of a designated landing site using an advanced visual navigation system......

Good luck.

Cheers.

I wonder if this 1 will spring a leak as well.

Russian Soyuz docks at ISS, cosmonauts and astronaut aboard.

A glass that is stronger, lighter and takes 30% less energy to produce will have to be seen to be believed.

Researchers develop game-changing new glass with 10 times more resistance than what’s used today: ‘It simply wouldn’t crack’.

Cheers.

There's no doubt about it, us humans have just got to leave a mess behind us wherever we go.

Perseverance Spots Debris From Jet Pack Crash Site On Mars.

Did the cold night kill it?

No sign of Chandrayaan-3 as India searches for sleeping moon mission.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is scanning for signals from its Chandrayaan-3 mission to the surface of the moon, but so far there have been no signs of the Vikram lander or Pragyan rover waking up from the harsh, two-week-long lunar night. If attempts are unsuccessful then the hardware will likely have succumbed to the moon's freezing conditions.

"Efforts have been made to establish communication with the Vikram lander and Pragyan rover to ascertain their wake-up condition. As of now, no signals have been received from them. Efforts to establish contact will continue," the Indian space agency tweeted on 22 September.

ISRO launched Chandrayaan-3 in July with Vikram touching down on the surface on 23 August before releasing the Pragyan rover, which successfully covered around 100 metres on the surface.

Both devices carried out their scientific experiments successfully and Vikram even performed a "hop" manoeuvre, aking off to an altitude of 40 centimetres, moving laterally around the same distance and landing once again. This test was designed to give ISRO engineers valuable data for future landings.

India's moon craft enter sleep mode and await freezing lunar night

Around two weeks after the mission began - one lunar day - both devices went into “sleep mode” and prepared for sunset and subsequent freezing conditions as low as -238°C (-394°F) that could destroy their electronic components.......

Cheers.

They said the mission was over after 14 days. They hope that the returning sunshine will allow the probe's systems to restart. They suspect the probe is maybe in the shadow of rocks and it will take longer to warm up.

Did they test this in the lab beforehand? Frozen for 14 days at -238°C (-394F)? Crazy. Maybe they were hoping for a miracle. I would have guessed that a space probe needs to continuously heat its electronics in order to remain functional (e.g.: Voyager 1/2).

Scientists are scratching their heads again after something happened where they didn't expect it too.

NASA Detects Bizarre, Extraordinarily Bright Explosion in Unexpected Place.

An extraordinarily bright explosion in an unexpected place has been detected by the Hubble Space Telescope, a joint project of NASA and the European Space Agency.

In a study published in an upcoming issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal, a team of researchers describes a rare phenomenon known as a Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transient (LFBOT).

These cosmic explosions were first discovered in 2018, and only a handful have been found since then. Their origins are poorly understood, but a number of potential explanations have been proposed.

Researchers have identified a particular set of LFBOT characteristics that have been detected so far. These phenomena shine intensely in blue light and evolve rapidly, reaching peak brightness before fading away in a few days.

The latest LFBOT to be discovered is unusual in that it appeared in a location where no one expected it to be, far between two galaxies, which puzzled scientists.

The LFBOT, known as AT2023fh and nicknamed "the Finch," was observed with multiple telescopes after it was first spotted in April by the Zwicky Transient Facility, a wide-angle, ground-based camera that scans the entire northern sky every two days.

But only Hubble was able to accurately pinpoint its location—about 50,000 light-years from a nearby spiral galaxy and roughly 15,000 light-years from a smaller galaxy.....

Cheers.

Some new pics have been released of Jupiter and its moon Io.

NASA shares never-before-seen images of Jupiter's lava-covered moon, Io.


Cheers.

2 bits of news from here down under.

It has been named.

Australia's first Moon rover to be named Roo-ver, after public competition receives more than 8,000 submissions.

And back from the ashes in a new way.

New Quantum Optical Ground Station allows Canberra to play starring role in space communications.

Cheers.

Jeff's space tourism venture gets a little closer to reality.

Bezos’ Blue Origin launches rocket after failed 2022 flight attempt.

Blue Origin’s tourism rocket — designed to vault paying customers on brief trips to the edge of space — successfully launched Tuesday morning on an uncrewed science mission.

The New Shepard rocket lifted off at 11:43 a.m. ET from Blue Origin’s facilities on a private ranch in West Texas. The 33 science experiments on board experienced a few minutes of microgravity before safely returning to Earth.

The rocket booster touched down about seven minutes after launch, followed by a safe landing of the capsule about 10 minutes after launch.....

Cheers.

Rep. Burchett to Newsmax: Aliens Are Real, Covered-Up

Tennessee GOP Rep. Tim Burchett, during a Tuesday appearance on Newsmax, proclaimed that aliens are 100% real and that his proposal in an annual defense policy bill to make this public was cut. It would put the Department of Defense "out of business," as well as a host of other reasons such as "power" and "corruption."

According to USA Today, Burchett's proposal would have ordered the Pentagon to declassify records "'relating to publicly known sightings' of UFOs as long as they 'do not reveal sources, methods or otherwise compromise the national security of the United States.'"

-- snip --

.. Burchett responds. "I'm not saying I know everything. But I do know that this thing has been a cover-up since day one."

Mr. Burchett seems to know, via the secret briefings Congress receives, that we have recovered crashed ET spacecraft. He also appears to assume that we understand their workings well enough to duplicate them, and so, 'put the Department of Defense "out of business"'. If we could do that, wouldn't we already have such craft at our disposal, eliminating the need for our current conventional military planes?

The truth of the matter may be a bit more embarrassing. I strongly suspect that we are no more capable of understanding or 'reverse engineering' such vehicles, than a cave man could build a jet plane, even if he somehow had a crashed one to examine, and pick apart at his leisure.

The reluctance of the Pentagon to reveal its knowledge of the UFO situation could hinge on an embarrassing fact. The military establishment can neither explain nor control the UFO/UAP phenomenon. It remains free to flit machines about in our skies, which do things no human-made craft can do.

The U.S.'s latest return to the moon looks to be in trouble already.

The first US moon lander since Apollo is leaking fuel after launch. Now its mission is in jeopardy.

The first US-built lunar lander since the days of Apollo is leaking fuel — and it could put the entire mission at risk.

Peregrine Mission One, a lunar lander built by Astrobotic, started leaking fuel hours after it launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Monday.

"Unfortunately, it appears the failure within the propulsion system is causing a critical loss of propellant," the company said in an update Monday afternoon.

Now the team is trying to figure out if there are "alternative mission profiles" for the lander, in order to focus on "maximizing the science and data we can capture."

In other words, the moon landing is in jeopardy.....

Sounds like a soft moon landing will be completely off...

What is it with all these leaky or stuck or corroded propellant/oxidizer valves?


Fly safe folks!
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

What is it with all these leaky or stuck or corroded propellant/oxidizer valves?

Same people who do such quality work they don't bother and tighten down bolts with castle nuts and put in tie wires, because, they will still give me my paycheck. Isn't entitlement wonderful?

Astrobotics Technology, founded in 2007, is a relative newcomer. Perhaps they need some more time to get the hang of things. They've announced today that the Moon landing is definitely off. They propose to conduct experiments in space, until the batteries run down, but most of the equipment was intended for work specifically on the Lunar surface. Detection of surface and subsurface ice, five tiny Lunar rovers, etc.

Get your hard hats ready.

The doomed US moon lander is on a collision course with Earth and will be destroyed to protect other satellites.

"Our latest assessment now shows the spacecraft is on a path towards Earth, where it will likely burn up in Earth's atmosphere," Astrobotic, the company behind the Peregrine lander, said on Saturday.

The Pittsburgh-based company believes the lander could be manoeuvered to avoid falling back to Earth, but has decided that it is too unstable to fly around other spacecraft.

"Ultimately, we must balance our own desire to extend Peregrine's life, operate payloads, and learn more about the spacecraft, with the risk that our damaged spacecraft could cause a problem in cislunar space," Astrobotic said.

Cislunar space is the area around the moon....

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

US company's failed Peregrine Moon lander believed to have burned up after re-entry over Australia.

Another country's effort finally lands on the moon, but there's a problem.

Japan's 'Moon Sniper' lands but power running low.

Japan on Saturday became the fifth nation to achieve a soft lunar landing, but said its "Moon Sniper" spacecraft was running out of power due to a solar battery problem.

After a nail-biting 20-minute descent, space agency JAXA said its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) had touched down and communication had been established.

But without the solar cells functioning, JAXA official Hitoshi Kuninaka said the craft -- dubbed the "Moon Sniper" for its precision technology -- would only have power for "several hours".

SLIM is one of several new lunar missions launched by governments and private firms, 50 years after the first human Moon landing.

Crash landings and communication failures are rife, and only four other countries have made it to the Moon: the United States, the Soviet Union, China and most recently India.

As mission control prioritised gathering data while they could, Kuninaka suggested that the batteries might work again once the angle of the sun changed.

"It's possible that it is not facing in the originally planned direction," he told an early-hours news conference.

"If the descent was not successful, it would have crashed at a very high speed. If that were the case, all functionality of the probe would be lost," he said.

"But data is being sent to Earth."......

Cheers.