Because It’s Friday is all about finding something interesting to ease all of us into the weekend, following a week of usually stressful cyber security news.
I have been away on leave for the last few weeks and space has taken centre stage whilst I have been away, with some interesting images from the NASA space telescopes and details of NASA’s longest running mission.
For this post, on my return to the office today, I was looking for something different, but everywhere I looked there were stories about moon missions! So the moon it is.
The Successful
India has landed a spacecraft on the moon complete with a lunar rover. There have only been three other countries who have had successful moon landings – India is the fourth.
The mission has landed in the unexplored South Pole region – although calling it unexplored probably applies to most of the moon!
Chandrayaan-3: India lunar rover Pragyaan takes a walk on the Moon – BBC
The image above was released by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and shows the moon surface and part of the leg of the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft.
There should be more exciting science, images and video to come from this space mission as the Indians are not being shy about sharing this good news story.
The Not So Successful
Russia – who tends to share less – has announced that its Luna-25 spacecraft has crashed into the moon. This was Russia’s first lunar mission in nearly fifty years and was, like India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission, planned to land at the South Pole.
Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft crashes into Moon – BBC
Russia is another of the now four countries to have successfully landed missions on the moon.
The Planned
The United States is another of the four countries to have successfully landed missions on the moon and the only one so far to have landed people on the surface.
NASA has an ongoing mission to return people to the surface of the moon. The crew that will fly the Artemis II spacecraft out and around the moon, as the next step in that mission, have been to look at spacecraft they will be using.
No moon landing on this ride – just like Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 – close but no prize. However these types of ground breaking, fact finding missions are essential if a successful landing is to be made with astronauts onboard.
Have a good weekend.
Clive Catton MSc (Cyber Security) – by-line and other articles
Further Reading
Image credit: ISRO via Twitter
