Artemis 1 Cubesats, Ride-Along Robots Options

[Phil Stooke]

By assembling bits and pieces from a few websites including Project Pluto and the Minor Planet Center, plus Scott Tilley on Twitter, I have made this brief summary of recent activities by EQUULEUS:


"On 16 March 2023 astronomers detected an apparent asteroid, A10TGEB, which was soon found to be EQUULEUS. It had made a lunar flyby at an altitude of c. 50000 km on 10 March, before that 'discovery'. It will pass by Earth at c. 35000 km altitude on 6 April 2023 and on 27 May it will pass by the Moon at 30400 +/- 8800 km, changing its orbit from 62580 by 620910 km to 162000 by 990000 km."

Basically, EQUULEUS is in a large orbit of Earth which is perturbed by lunar flybys and is being shaped gradually until the spacecraft can slip into an orbit about the Earth-Moon L2 point. From L2 it will study Earth's plasma and look for meteorite impacts on the Moon's unilluminated portion. As far as I can tell it is still healthy.

If anyone has additional details of the trajectory or hears of any other activity, please post it or let me know.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

https://www.wired.it/article/artemis-1-viag...luca-parmitano/

This article (in Italian, and published during the mission) seems to say that Argomoon succeeded in imaging the upper stage of Artemis 1 and later cubesat deployments, but no images have been released (there would be some ITAR or other restrictions, though nothing that should warrant a total blackout). A clearer update would be useful.

Phil

[marsbug]

Thank you for the updates and detective work Phil Stooke!

[Phil Stooke]

Actual positive news for a change. But buried on the Japanese Twitter account for EQUULEUS (not on the English language version yet). This is machine-translated.



The Phoenix camera is designed to image Earth's plasmasphere in the ultraviolet. Apollo 16's UV camera took an image like that and so did an instrument on the Chang'e 3 lander.

I don't know where EQUULEUS is now - maybe near L2 and maybe not, who can say? EDIT: Aha, it is due to make a lunar flyby on 27 May which will change its orbit, part of the long process of getting into its L2 halo position with minimal use of fuel. Chance of some Moon images then!

Phil

[climber]

Update here : https://spacenews.com/artemis-1-cubesat-nea...end-of-mission/

[Phil Stooke]

Here is Jonathan's Space Report, No. 819, the most recent edition.


https://planet4589.org/space/jsr/back/news.819.txt

A good summary of the fate of the various cubesats and some other missions.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

I was just at the Lunar Surface Science Workshop, where we had a bit of news of two Artemis cubesats.

LunaH-Map couldn't get its thrusters to fire so couldn't go into lunar orbit, but it did make neutron measurements as it flew past the Moon. The closest approach was over roughly 15 N, 120 E on the far side, where the neutron data sampled a broad region maybe 60 degrees across. Before and after that it made effectively unresolved full-disk observations of the near side and far side. No data analysis yet but it will go into the PDS.

BioSentinel, an Ames mission to grow yeast and observe effects of radiation on it, also carried a radiation detector. The biology experiment was tried but higher than expected humidity in the sealed experiment made it rather ineffective. The radiation detector was successful and sampled two Coronal Mass Ejection events. Overall, not terribly useful but a lot was learned about experiment design which will apply to a CLPS mission to do biology on the Moon.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

https://xtech.nikkei.com/atcl/nxt/column/18/00001/08181/

This article (in Japanese) says EQUULEUS lost power on 18 May 2023 apparently because it lost attitude control and began spinning. There might be some hope of re-establishing contact but I would not be optimistic.

That appears to draw to a conclusion the sorry tale of the Artemis 1 cubesats. There will be no cubesats on Artemis 2.

Phil