India locates ‘lost lander’ on lunar surface
SES selects SpaceX to launch MEO communications system
NEW DELHI, Sept 9, (Agencies): The lander module from India’s moon mission was located on the lunar surface on Sunday, one day after it lost contact with the space station, and efforts are underway to try to establish contact with it, the head of the nation’s space agency said.
The Press Trust of India news agency cited Indian Space and Research Organization chairman K. Sivan as saying cameras from the moon mission’s orbiter had located the lander. “It must have been a hard landing,” PTI quoted Sivan as saying.
ISRO officials could not be reached for comment.
The space agency said it lost touch with the Vikram lunar lander on Saturday as it made its final approach to the moon’s south pole to deploy a rover to search for signs of water.
A successful landing would have made India just the fourth country to land a vessel on the lunar surface, and only the third to operate a robotic rover there.
The space agency said Saturday that the lander’s descent was normal until 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the lunar surface.
The roughly $140 million mission, known as Chandrayaan-2, was intended to study permanently shadowed moon
the survival of the Mount Graham Red squirrel. An estimated 75 remain in the Pinaleno Mountains of western Arizona after fires and development have shrunk their range.
The Mojave poppy bee of Nevada faces potential threats from grazing, gypsum mining, recreation and competition from honeybees. Its survival is closely linked to two rare desert poppy flowers in the Mojave Desert. (AP) craters that are thought to contain water deposits that were confirmed by the Chandrayaan-1 mission in 2008.
The latest mission lifted off on July 22 from the Satish Dhawan space center in Sriharikota, an island off the coast of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.
After its launch, Chandrayaan-2 spent several weeks making its way toward the moon, ultimately entering lunar orbit on Aug 20.
The Vikram lander separated from the mission’s orbiter on Sept. 2 and began a series of braking maneuvers to lower its orbit and ready itself for landing.
Only three nations – the United States, the former Soviet Union and China – have landed a spacecraft on the moon.
SES announced today that it has selected SpaceX as a launch partner to deliver its next-generation Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellite constellation into space on board Falcon 9 rockets from Cape Canaveral. The two companies have disrupted the industry in the past when SES became the first to launch a commercial GEO satellite with SpaceX, and later as the first ever payload on a SpaceX reusable rocket. Their next launch, in 2021, will be another one for the records as the revolutionary terabit-scale capabilities of SES’s O3b mPOWER communications system disrupt the industry again.
The global O3b mPOWER system comprises an initial constellation of seven high-throughput, low-latency MEO satellites, each capable of generating thousands of electronicallysteered beams that can be dynamically adjusted to serve customers in various markets including telecom and cloud, communications-on-the-move and government. O3b mPOWER also will include a variety of intelligent, application-specific Customer Edge Terminals integrated with SES’ terrestrial network and dynamically optimised using the recently announced Adaptive Resource Control (ARC) software system, further boosting O3b mPOWER’s market-leading flexibility.
“Momentum in the O3b mPOWER ecosystem is accelerating quickly as we continue to build the right partnerships to bring this massively innovative communications system to market,” said Steve Collar, CEO of SES. “Working with SpaceX as our launch provider is fitting because in the last seven years we have already jointly made multiple revolutionary industry advancements that make access to space innovation more cost-efficient and unlock new opportunities in critical markets.
Subsea observatory vanishes:
A German research organization is searching, so far in vain, for an underwater environmental monitoring station that was moored on the sea bed and went missing last month.
The device, which measured water flow and methane concentration among other things, was located 22 meters (72 feet) under the surface of Eckernfoerde Bay in northern Germany. It weighed some 740 kilograms (1,630 pounds) and was moored by thick cables. (AP)