The LADEE mission has ended in a controlled crash.{credit}NASA{/credit}

A NASA spacecraft that studied lunar dust vaporized into its own cloud of dust when it hit the Moon, as planned, in a mission-ending impact on 17 April. Launched last September, the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) finished its primary mission in March. In early April, on an extended mission, it made close passes as low as 2 kilometres above the surface, gathering data on more than 100 low-elevation orbits. Mission controllers deliberately crashed it to avoid the chance that, left alone, it might crash and contaminate historic locations such as the Apollo landing sites.

During its lifetime, LADEE made the best measurements yet of the dust generated when tiny meteorites bombard the surface. It is still hunting the mystery of a horizon glow seen by Apollo astronauts. It also carried a test for future laser communications between spacecraft and Earth.

In its final days the probe unexpectedly survived the cold and dark of a total lunar eclipse on 15 April. Just before the eclipse, NASA had the spacecraft perform a final engine burn that determined the crash trajectory. LADEE normally coped with just one hour of darkness every time it looped behind the Moon. The eclipse put it into darkness for some four hours, potentially jeopardizing the ability of its battery-powered heaters to keep the spacecraft from freezing to death. But the spacecraft survived.

NASA has been running a contest to predict the exact date and time of the LADEE impact, and this morning predicted there may be multiple winners. When it hit, the probe was travelling about three times as fast as a rifle bullet. In the coming months the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will take pictures of the crash site, which engineers are still determining.

A new year is a good time to make long-term plans, and NASA has jumped into the deep end of planning. On 20 December the US space agency’s astrophysics division released a wish list of future space missions — looking three decades into the future, and even beyond.

The new ‘astrophysics road map’ is notable not because it restates broad and popular themes it thinks scientists should pursue, such as ‘Are we Alone?’, ‘How Did We Get Here?’ and ‘How Does Our Universe Work?’, but because the report, compiled by a team led by NASA’s Chryssa Kouveliotou, also lays out the technologies needed to help missions answer these broad-brush questions.

Breaking down the next three decades into 10-year increments, the road map notes that ‘near-term’ projects for the next decade are already slated, such the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission that launched this week and the James Webb Space Telescope, slated for a 2018 liftoff. For the decade that follows, the report lays out notional missions spanning the electromagnetic spectrum, from a microwave mission studying the polarization of the cosmic microwave background left over from the Big Bang, through infrared and optical light all the way to X-rays. Looking out 20–30 years from now, the road map aims even broader, at a series of ‘mapper’ missions targeting Earth-like planets, black holes, cosmic dawn and gravitational waves.

It won’t be easy. Today’s technologies simply aren’t suited to future mission needs. For the most part, the road map notes, “our methods of building space telescopes have not progressed much beyond building and testing a ground-based telescope and rocketing it into space”.  That’s bad because materials and optics behave very differently in an Earth-bound lab than they do in the zero-gravity environment of space. “The key to bigger and better space telescopes may rely, instead, on assembling and testing telescopes on-orbit,” the team writes.

One idea is to develop flexible membranes that could be used to collect light in place of monolithic mirror glass. Another is to use three-dimensional printing to manufacture components directly in orbit; such a printer is slated to fly to the International Space Station next year, in the first test in space for this technology.

Finally, future missions will probably rely heavily on interferometry, in which multiple telescope inputs are combined to create much sharper images than any individual telescope could produce. To pull this off in space, engineers will need to develop precise ways to fly spacecraft in tandem and to improve laser measurements to combine the inputs from the different craft and produce the final image. Pulling off any of the missions in the 20- to 30-year time frame will require massive advances in this area, the road map notes.

Now it’s up to NASA to see if it can fulfill such dreams. With ongoing funding difficulties, that’s far from a sure bet.

China’s lunar rover is on its way to the Moon. The Chang’e-3 spacecraft lifted off successfully in the wee hours of 2 December from the Xichang launch centre in Sichuan.

China’s lunar probe as seen against the limb of the Earth.{credit}CCTV{/credit}

A Long March 3B rocket lofted the probe into Earth orbit and then on a trajectory directly towards the Moon. As the rocket separated, a camera on board captured spectacular images of Chang’e-3 on its way (pictured).

Barring disaster, the probe is expected to reach lunar orbit in about four days. A date for the rover’s landing on the surface has not been officially announced, but it is expected to take place around 14 December. The landing site is thought to be the Sinus Iridum region on the lunar near side.

Chang’e-3 represents the first rover to visit the Moon since the Soviet Lunokhod-2 mission in 1973, and the first soft landing of any kind since the Soviet Luna-24 mission in 1976.

Chang’e-3 follows two earlier Chinese lunar orbiters. It carries a six-wheeled rover named Yutu, the ‘jade rabbit’ companion of the Moon goddess Chang’e. Its scientific instruments include cameras, an ultraviolet telescope and an X-ray spectrometer mounted on a robotic arm.

In other space developments, the Indian Space Research Organization conducted a rocket burn aboard its Mars Orbiter Mission — India’s first Mars probe — on 1 December. That probe had been circling Earth since its launch last month. It is now headed for Mars, with an expected arrival in September 2014.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is shuttering all of its North American facilities as of 7 PM Eastern time on 4 October, thanks to the government shutdown.

{credit}Henry Newton; NRAO{/credit}

Telescopes to be closed include the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array and the Very Long Baseline Array outside Socorro, New Mexico, plus the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. All are iconic radio telescopes with active observing programmes.

After the government closed on 1 October, the NRAO had about a week’s worth of operating funds that carried it until today, says Anthony Beasley, director of the NRAO, which is based in Charlottesville, Virginia. The observatory is funded by the National Science Foundation.

A skeleton staff will maintain physical security around the antennas, but most of the NRAO’s 475 employees are going on unpaid furlough, Beasley says. Staff will maintain minimal power to the equipment, including cryogenically cooled receivers that will be kept cold rather than allowed to warm up and then cooled down, expensively, if and when operations resume.

Beasley estimates that NRAO facilities can be up and running within 2–3 days after a government restart. In the meantime, a secondary telescope at Green Bank will continue to work to provide a downlink for a Russian radio astronomy experiment, and two antennas of the Very Long Baseline Array will remain live to help the US Naval Observatory, which relies on them for mission operations.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope array in Chile, which NRAO is a partner in, will remain open for now. Beasley says that the NRAO has about a month’s worth of funding left for its ALMA contributions.