Main Engine Cut Off - T+257: Chandrayaan-3, Luna-25, and the Deep Space Network (with Scott Tilley)

Episode Date: August 31, 2023

Scott Tilley joins me to talk about ISRO’s success with Chandrayaan-3, Roscosmos’ Luna-25 mission and the mystery behind it, and the state of the Deep Space Network.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 34 executive producers—Pat, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut), Joel, Fred, Craig from SpaceHappyHour.com, Steve, Pat from KC, Joonas, Jan, Kris, David, Frank, Russell, Tyler, Lee, The Astrogators at SEE, Warren, Benjamin, SmallSpark Space Systems, Chris, Ryan, Lars and Will from Agile Space, Dawn Aerospace, Theo and Violet, Harrison, Matt, Bob, Stealth Julian, Donald, and four anonymous—and 842 other supporters.TopicsScott Tilley 🇺🇦 (@coastal8049) / XRiddles in the Sky – A blog dedicated to observing, mostly classified, satellites.Episode 51 - Hubbles In Reverse - Off-NominalChandrayaan-3: India becomes fourth country to land on the moon - SpaceNewsISRO on X: “Beyond Borders, Across Moonscapes: India's Majesty knows no bounds!. Once more, co-traveller Pragyan captures Vikram in a Snap! This iconic snap was taken today around 11 am IST from about 15 m. The data from the NavCams is processed by SAC/ISRO, Ahmedabad.”Luna-25 crashes into moon after orbit maneuver - SpaceNewsScott Tilley 🇺🇦 on X: “I have been asked repeatedly about #Luna25. Thus far I have no independent observations of the mission to share. That is not without extensive trying to observe it. So why am I not detecting anything? 🧵⬇️”NASA Deep Space Network reaches “critical point” as demand grows - SpaceNewsCrescent Space | HomeIntuitive Machines to Deploy and Operate First Lunar Communication Satellite in 2022The ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen to MECO HeadlinesListen to Off-NominalJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterArtwork photo by ArianespaceWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

this may sound like a bizarre thing but i work with a boat yard on the side of a mountain i might just make that the intro of this show we haul the boat and drive up the side of the mountain and then fix it. All right. This may be the first ever cold open to a main engine cutoff. So Scott Tilley, welcome to the podcast in the most epic way possible. You've not been on Miko before. You've been on the other show that I do, Off Nominal, which I can tell by the numbers,

there are tons of people that listen to this show that have not yet listened to Off Nominal. So I'm going to link in the show notes uh to the show that we did i don't know a year ago or something like that maybe even longer than that um talking about what it is that you do so people can go there for the full story but can you give us a like one minute intro to what it is you do and what you're all about well essentially i look up using radio and optical uh means and look at satellites and other things that are going on in space and, you know, report their orbits, report what they're doing radio wise. And most importantly, with some missions, basically, are they doing what the operators claim they're doing? And if the operators aren't saying anything, then we fill in the blanks.

claim they're doing. And if the operators aren't saying anything, then we fill in the blanks. And that's why we come here today on the, uh, on the just past the lunar first week of lunar craziness, because there's going to be so many lunar landers in the next couple of years. Uh, so we had two lunar landers flying somewhat close to each other, at least in time, maybe not necessarily in space, uh, which we'll get But let's start on the more straightforward one, the Indian mission, Chandrayaan-3, successfully landed on the moon. You tracked it all the way out there. I don't know if you've, you probably did track Chandrayaan-2 and some of the other past attempts that ISRO had. Is that true? Yeah, absolutely. Any main differences or things

that you'd take away from chandra and three and its approach to the moon um no it was pretty much textbook uh everything they did was um pretty much as they claimed um there was minor discrepancies mostly probably because people were rounding numbers for the clock instead of saying we're gonna do something at you, one o'clock, you know, then it would, it occurred at, you know, five or 10 minutes too. So after watching a number of those, um, events come and go and seeing what we saw on the Doppler plots, um, it was clear to me that they were just rounding. Um, it was probably just to keep it simple for their social media and communications.

Um, other than that, the Indians did everything. It was probably just to keep it simple for their social media and communications. Other than that, the Indians did everything, you know, they were very open, transparent about what they were doing, when they were doing it. And, you know, which is really refreshing to see. You know, it takes some of the fun out of it for guys like me, because then you don't, you know, you don't get to sit around thinking, hmm, what are they doing? What could be the next move and when are they going to do it? But on the other side of it too, it allows you to focus more on the communication side of it. And that's really the neat thing for me is the Indian people

are just and still are very, very into this mission. And it's kind of an extra central thing over there and which rightly so like the Indian space program is an example of a country that has organized its space program in such a way that it's highly efficient and focused on doing practical things that the Indians need and their launch and their mission is a really good example of that. Instead of building big-ass rockets for one-off events or limited use that has no commercial value, the Indians are simply reusing rockets that they have utilized

for their commercial space aspects, like putting useful communication satellites in space, um, or, or, uh, like, um, other missions that people pay for. And so why build a big rocket to send something to the moon? Why not just take a couple of months to get it there and just think it through. And that's, that's kind of the Indian philosophy and, you know, it's really comes out in their space program and it's, it's developed, um, I think developed. I think they've had their ups and downs, especially with the last landing attempt. But this time, it definitely demonstrated that it's not just a desperate attempt to get on the moon. It's like a very calculated, careful, thought-through process. And they've demonstrated they can do it on an extreme budget.

um process and they've demonstrated they can do it on an extreme budget i'm always impressed by the budgets of isro and jaxa when they do these planetary missions uh i forget the exact number but high abusa 2 was like a shoestring budget if you look at how much they spent on that and what they were able to accomplish from jaxa um there's missions that make me go, oh, what if it wasn't like every mission ended up being a flagship class spend? It's really cool to see those things. And then even when you look at like the progression that ISRO has taken with their lunar missions, Chandrayaan-2 was largely the same spacecraft except for key elements like the engine configuration. On Chandrayaan-2, it was five engines. One of them was throttleable. This time, four throttleable engines,

and they're able to pull it off successfully. Throttleable engines continue to be the key thing to landing on the moon. No one has landed on the moon without a throttleable engine before, and a fairly good throttle range as well. So, you know, just keep that in mind as we go out and we see all these Eclipse landers

start to fly towards the moon. I feel like there's, there's different classes of lunar landers, I would say in terms of complexity. Um, and now of course they rolled a rover off as well. So stuff seems to be going well. They've got some sweet pictures of the lander on the surface. Um, in terms of where it landed 69 degrees South, everyone was saying South pole. There's like, this is the new, we always have to have a gatekeeping conversation online, which is who's an astronaut, who's not an astronaut, what is orbit, what is space?

We always have like different things that we want to gatekeep around. So this seems to be the newest one of like, how close do you need to be to 90 to get to the South Pole of the moon? I'm not sure if from your perspective tracking this, was there anything different about where it's sitting on the lunar surface versus some of the other missions you've tracked out at the moon before?

From a tracking perspective, not so much. A lot of the recent lunar missions have been put into lunar polar orbits. When I say polar, just the inclination of the orbit is up and down, not sideways like the Apollo type missions. So that allows them to land anywhere on the moon, really, as long as you have it planned out and you got sunlight. I think that that's the other aspect of why I think this is a polar mission. And look at that image of the lander on the moon. polar mission. And look at that image of the lander on the moon. What do you notice about the solar panels? They're nearly vertical. They're on the sides of the land itself. And if you carefully, and I'm looking at this because this is going to be the coup de grace

of the whole mission, is watching it go to sleep. If you carefully look at that image that India revealed, which I've been waiting for, and I've been staring at shadows on the moon, what is the orientation of the lander versus the rollout lamp? Because if you look at all the pictures of the lander, you'll see that there's three sides with solar panels, one side without. That's where the lander gets out. So it looks like they orientated the lander in such a way that the solar panel facing of the off side of the spacecraft is facing north. The ramp is facing south. And the other two vertical panels are east and west. So that means that as the sun does its thing over the site, when I say over, it's actually kind of hugging the horizon because it's so low in, uh,

uh, latitude on the moon. This is where we'll shake out the one flat earther that I have listening. So then, then what happens in a few days on September 4th, when the moon, when the sun sets there, um, so the, the, the unit should have power right up to sunset based on what I can see. The very last second, yeah. And modeling that, it turns out that I can see sunset of Chandra Ion 3 here from my observing site. So what are the Indians going to do? Are they just going to let it fade out? Or are they going to switch it off and attempt to turn it back on? So that would be an interesting, and they're not saying,

I haven't said anything about that because I don't think it's really planned, but it will be an interesting observation to make. So I've been doing recordings every night of the signal from the spacecraft to get kind of a sense of it. I'm trying to do a little bit of science in the background from it.

You know, what can I figure out from it? Can I see the libations of the moon as it rotates around, et cetera, based on the radio signal? Like, what can we learn from that? And what can we see from a carrier that just beeps for hours on end and doesn't really do much? So those are a couple of interesting observational things that I'm hoping to see as the mission finishes off here in the next few days.

But to go back to it, I think it's certainly a polar mission in the sense that it's testing techniques. And if you want to go to the South Pole, you got to know you can get power to these things. And it would be nice to know what's going on on the surface. these things um and it would be nice to know what's going on on the surface um and because as you approach the south pole if you make a small mistake of where you land you're in a dark crater and you're done yeah you know you know it's it's like and you might not even be able to see what you're getting into well yeah it's like with the lander it's just going to come down and and i think that's another part of what uh ice row is trying to do is they were trying to do a precision landing basically say that we're going to land on this box and we can't

land outside of it because otherwise if we try to go closer to the south pole um then the lander could invariably land in a very awkward spot uh which would not be you know good for the mission i imagine if they did land in a dark crater, it would be probably instant death for the, you know, it would land there and it would have very limited battery power and the temperatures there would be so cold that the electronics would probably rapidly freeze and that would be the end of it.

And not to mention whether they'd actually be able to transmit anything back depending on the geometry that they landed and where was that all that yeah yeah i mean you got enough problems getting through the trees up where you are so imagine a lunar crater and the angles will be very very low because you got to think that the earth and the sun are going to be low on the horizon so it changes your whole thinking about, you know, when you start to model it and actually think about what it would be like to be there. It's a very polar place. In that sense, it's like be going to the northern or southern extremities of the earth. And when you if you've ever traveled there, I have been up into the Canadian Arctic, and it's distinctly polar when you get above 60 degrees it's you know you start to

realize that okay i'm this is not you're not in kansas anymore or something like that it's it's a very different astronomical place and it doesn't matter what time of year you go up you can go off in mid-summer it might be nice and warm and almost desert like in some parts up there but you know when it's daylight all day long and you're seeing auroras through the very the twilight for hours at night you know it's it's like it's a very different environment optically and astronomically so i would say i my my vote on it is yes it's they landed in the polar region of the moon um so i've debated with some planetary scientists online and stuff like that. Well, you know, planets in those regions are pretty much, until you're at the pole, it's really not much.

It's pretty much the same. And I'm like, well, not from a spacecraft point of view. Yeah, right. It's like, you know, if you're going to the polar region of the moon and you wanted power from the sun, perhaps, or communication with Earth, it's a very different beast than landing on the equator where everything's lined up and you know the sun's going to be high overhead that is funny like yeah you think okay well i have to get into you know the the antarctic circle essentially of the moon but it's like yeah but spacecraft wise after a

certain degree nothing's different you didn't nothing changed when you got from this line to that line you're still operating in the same format so yeah from that's probably a good way to think about it from a spacecraft design perspective you know what challenges are you solving what considerations you have to make like you even pointed out simple stuff like the solar panels totally different um and yeah not a lot of people think about the actual orientation of their craft when they're landing on the surface and which direct which direction you want to be pointed um i feel like maybe people that have played ksp probably have thought about that before but like other than that you wouldn't really consider it on on any

general basis it seems to me that the indians carefully considered the orientation that the spacecraft landed so that's something else that hasn't been spoken about in the media that picture spoke volumes to me as soon as i saw it and I saw the shadows, because that image was taken at lunar noon on that site. If you look at the geometry, and that's one of the reasons, yeah, if you look at it, you can see the shadows perfectly lining up and it tells the whole story about how they, it's a very subtle way for them to say look what we did not only did we land on the moon but we orientated the spacecraft for maximum power generation now if you landed on the equator it wouldn't matter you just aim the solar panel straight up and whatever you happen to do

then good enough um if you're landing on the pole of the moon you got to like consider those kind of things it's either that or you have to have a spacecraft that's able to orientate yeah which is complications one of the uh vertical solar panels like we're seeing developing for the nasa missions and you know astrobotic and others are working on these kind of vertical rollout arrays that can then spin on their axis there and and you're a little bit more independent of seasonality really when you get down to it i could imagine that lander when it was coming in, it probably came down, and it probably did a final decision about orientation. Where's the sun?

Do you think that's what that long hover phase was for? Because they had a very long hover. I'm just speculating here, and we'd have to look at the video. But I think it came down, it hovered there for a bit, and I think there was a bit of a rotation. rotation i have to go back and look at the video and i think there was there was definitely some kind of orientational aspect to it because if they managed to land like that just by happenstance well that's incredible luck when you have 360 other or 359 other options. Totally true. Awesome.

All right, well, let's get to the other angle here, which we've talked about on Off Nominal last week, which is, I don't know, there's so much to this story. So Luna 25 out of Roscosmos. We don't have to go through the whole history of this lunar lander itself. That's been in development for, I don't know, I feel like my lifetime at this point, probably since the 90s right it was it was in development and just kept getting delayed and delayed and delayed and and launched we'll go with the official story for a

minute scott so don't get fired up over there don't start flipping the table yet launched it was on a very similar timeline of chandra n3 i think it was two days ahead uh when it launched and transferred out to the moon was supposed to land uh a day or two before chandra and three based on the timelines we had been told um and then they had a i forget what the exact term they used for their catastrophic issue was but effectively said that they were performing an orbit change maneuver and fired for like twice as long as they planned to and then impacted the moon because of uh they dropped their perigee or peri-lune i guess would be right um too low impacted the surface never went for a landing attempt so everybody was like oh no who could have seen this coming uh and then there you are tweeting out that uh you were never actually

able to independently confirm the existence of luna 25 so maybe roll back the clock and give us the full story on when you started tracking this and exactly what you felt throughout the process here okay so uh first of all it's not that i deny that luna 25 exists it's all, it's not that I deny that Luna 25 exists. It's not like it's something that didn't happen. There is some third-party evidence, and let's keep this to that kind of focus for a second. So Russia did launch something when they claimed it. It was observed by the U.S. Space Force and its related sensors. A rocket booster was cataloged from the launch in an orbital plane that's consistent with what they claimed.

I believe that booster is since re-entered. And there was another object that they cataloged, which we believe is either the stack of the Fregat, which is the fourth stage of the rocket and luna 25 so based on that information and the timings of everything i created a state vector a model and worked with gmat which is a free kind of um astrodynamics modeling program that nasa provides to develop a trajectory. Lo and behold,

there is a viable trajectory from the earth based on their launch plane of their, what the data that we have, um, that you can arrive on the earth approximately when the Russians said they would. So great. That's all I need.

Um, I've done this before with Chinese missions, um, where we've, all we've had is like no TAM data for airmen and naval assets to avoid having rocket boosters land on them. We were able to develop preliminary orbits, trajectories and basically say, OK, you know, this is where approximately in the sky where the thing should be. approximately in the sky where the thing should be and for more context i feel like you and the crew of people that do this kind of stuff on twitter like this is some of the best stuff that you do of like the u.s launched a spy satellite we don't really know where it was

like 25 was like okay this is what we live for that's what you guys do yeah you like give us 10 minutes and we'll have any details right let's figure it out so your website is literally called sky riddles so that is exactly the the kind of thing yeah so so here's the thing so the russians also did a couple of other things that they um they religiously do and have since the soviet times they put their radio frequencies on the itu and they also published in their own government records, the frequencies they would be using for telemetry, tracking and control. Unusually, Russia uses C-band for tracking and control, and they were planning on using X-band for their science part of the mission, which is

pretty normal. So broke out the C-band sensor and started sweeping areas of the sky. And while I was doing that, I was also looking for it on expand, uh, scanning the wide swaths of area of the sky around the hypothetical trajectory that I'd created that said, if you're within, if you go too far, this way or too far that way, you don't go to the moon. Um, so the trajectory kind of locks it in, right? So it's all based on timing and unless they adjusted the speed here and there you know you're generally going to

be somewhere in the sky you're not going to be on the other side of the earth or anything like that it's going to be here every day in some sort of lane and yeah i think the benefit there is the the closer it gets to the moon, the less search area. Right. Like the apparent position is a lot more constrained because it's farther away. Yeah. Yeah. So, so anyways, so this went on for day after day of basically going out manually scanning

on C-band looking for the Ptolemyic tracking and control beacon, which is basically the housekeeping beacon. So on most missions, that would be going 24-7. Some missions that are power conscious may shut it off, but generally would be active at certain points. Another key consideration for this mission is Russia lacks a worldwide deep space network. I can't imagine why they don't have access to a worldwide deep space network with their political leanings and activities, but they don't. They're a big country.

I mean, you know, they're trying to just expand territory to be able to set up more facilities. Something like that. So anyways, so there is the possibility that the Russians switch off the thing when it's not over Russia. So that occurred to me, which, sure, they could be doing that. Maybe they have a low power budget, or that's just what they do. That's they have a low power budget or they're just, that's just what they do. Um, I know from experience that Russian satellites and around the earth tend to be inactive over areas of the earth where they're not being used, but some of them are always active.

So you just don't know. Um, so at that point, uh, it arrives at the moon or we're told that it arrives at the moon and it enters lunar orbit. So at that point we know where to aim. Nothing, nothing, nothing. And then I would expect one of my colleagues in Europe or on the other side of the planet were also doing the same things that I was doing with the same stuff.

No reports, nothing, just static. stuff. No reports, nothing, just static. Another thing to be considering here is the moon's orientation to the sun, the time of this mission. So the other group that's locked out of observing it is the optical observers, because the moon was positioned in such a way it was near new. So all our optical friends would be locked out because you can't see anything in space when you're staring into the glare of the sun. So none of the mission was possible to be documented by optical observers. So if you want to put your tinfoil hat on for a second, if you wanted to launch something to the moon where you had complete ability to control the narrative this

was the perfect launch window you know anything you wanted to do was at the mercy of how you wanted to do it there's no the minimum you had a minimal chance of having third-party observation of your mission the only way they could do it really is by radio. And if you were very, very judicious in how you use your radio stuff, you could minimize that. So I'm not saying that that was part of what they were thinking, but it was certainly something that played out. So by the time Luna 25 had its unfortunate emergency, I was escalating my C-band attempts,

putting bigger and bigger dishes in the backyard, aiming at the moon. I'm going, where is this beacon? You know, where is this spacecraft? You know, why am I not hearing anything? Meanwhile, I'm hearing every other bit of Russian traffic on the TCNC channels from high earth orbit, medium earth orbit, and all the other stuff that they have going on there. And I'm not hearing a thing from Luna 25.

So I would have expected based on my experience with other Russian TTNT signals to easily detect it. You know, they don't send weak signals there. You know, even at the lunar distance, I should have been able to detect the thing. So my only theory is either it wasn't there or they were only transmitting when they did limited communication sessions with it. So here we're left with this kind of notion of, you know, did Luna 25 even get to the moon? The last independent observation of the mission was near Earth. There were some images that I saw online from some observatories of the mission leaving the near Earth's area. But all those observatories were related to the Russian government. So I'm not saying that they're lying.

But wouldn't that even pick up, though? The Forgot upper stage was still part of that Translunar belt, right? So there's something there. If they fired and they actually had a successful – they obviously did have a successful translunar injection. I'll give them that. The reason I say that is that the Space Force isn't providing TLEs for objects still in Earth orbit in some kind of eccentric orbit

or something like that. When I say successful, I mean that if the rocket fired and it went too long or the trajectory was wrong and it missed the moon or something like that, that's entirely another possibility. It could be in a really high Earth orbit that the Space Force can't track, or it could be lobbed out into a solar orbit, for all I know. We don't know. Other than what the Russian government has said publicly about it. We're left to wonder, you know, really what

happened in the mission. And I'm not trying to say like, you know, put your conspiracy hat on, you know, there's this, you know, mysterious Russian moon probe out in space somewhere doing God knows what, maybe it's not even that. My thinking on it is that the whole point of a lot of what we do is to verify the claims and demonstrate to people that what goes on in space is something that you can put your deck chair down and you can watch. It's not something you need to rely on your government to give you information on. An independent citizen can go

out and observe things in space and here's how to do it and you know and that's what um i'm kind of looking at with luna 25 is you know there is no third party evidence that i'm aware of um that it actually arrived at the moon and that actually engaged in the behavior that it engaged in, according to the Russian government, which is kind of, I think, in a certain sense, kind of counterproductive if the whole point of the mission is to gain prestige and demonstrate that the Russian space program, despite all of the things that it's got going against it right now, can accomplish these things. When you launch it, you have some kind of weird whatever uh music video presentation that they did rather than you know it just it just seemed really bizarre to me that

they would go to all these efforts to make it a pr event right and then not make it easy and obvious for the world to see right and that's exactly what i was going to go to is your comparison to the image that was released from chandra and three on the surface and being able to figure out from that they had really good control over the spacecraft they knew where it was pointing they knew how they wanted it to be pointed to maximize their power on the surface those are the kind of things that uh when you put out there you don't have to give yourself credit for these things there are it's kind of like the way that we search for aliens in the universe. It's like we send math into the universe because if there's aliens out there, they've probably done some math.

They understand the laws of physics of the universe that we share. So they will be able to translate Rosetta Stone style, the math that we did, to what it tracks on their side. Like doing these kind of things and transmitting what's going on with your spacecraft that are not spy spacecraft. Like, yes, sure, the U.S. shouldn't just send everyone pictures from keyhole satellites that say, look how good our imagery is. Occasionally they get tweeted out, but that wasn't like a particular plan to share how good our imagery is. But when it's a scientific spacecraft that you want to show, yeah, like scientific prowess and industrial prowess, you know, as much as these missions are part of that kind of, you know,

nationalistic sentiment, then, which Russia is certainly no stranger to, you would want to put as much information out there as possible. And maybe to compare one further, you know, all the Chinese missions that you've tracked over the last decade that they've flown to the moon, not only the landers, but I remember, you know, the relay satellite chi chow it was i think that was the name of it that they put at uh one of the garage points um that one was quite noisy right so there's even these missions that aren't necessarily like look at this picture of our lunar lander on the surface are trackable by what has been to this point the most secretive government in space um so just comparing against all these examples it's it would be really weird to pick the explanation that was like you know it's not

conspiratorial thinking when when we've been able to do this with every other mission of this kind in recent history and and this one is clearly not fitting that pattern so the only and this is where i put the tinfoil hat on a little bit, is so why would the Russian government make all these claims if it didn't arrive at the moon? Again, one could conceive that if there was an issue immediately after or during the translunar injection, that it would be highly embarrassing. Russia has this kind of history of things going in low-width orbit before they even get anywhere near where they're going.

Phobos grunt back, you know, I remember tracking that, you know, it did, it got into low earth orbit and it failed right away. And they didn't even have an ability to properly communicate with it or track it in low earth orbit. And they actually sought out amateur help, believe it or not. This was back during a period of time when there was a lot more goodwill to Russia. And we participated in trying to get optical data because the orbit was so low that it was difficult to get it through official channels in real time. So there's a history here of Russian missions failing right off the cuff.

Mars 96, right? Same deal. Yeah, let's just go right back to the first bit of it. And so not having any kind of verification of the progress of the mission from third parties that leaves one to think, if something did go wrong early of the mission from third parties that leaves one to think like you know if something did go wrong early in the mission um you you could create whatever narrative you wanted to make yourself look as best as possible i just don't get figure out i just can't figure out why that is like this is the best way you know like why is this the ultimate failure it

doesn't make any sense. This is the eighth world, but we've done it millions of times, except Russia. I just don't get why this would be the storyline chosen. And then, because you factor in as well, I'm not sure, you know, based on the info we've received, if the LRO team is going to be able to say this is where we should image. But LRO is up there for a while. It's taken a bunch of pictures. Pres pictures uh presumably we will see a whole there's some information that i've seen come out um there's a plot showing an orbital plane now we do know this they did say where they wanted to land and it was kind of close to where chenderion um tree landed So that implies that it was in some sort of

orbit that would have to be very polar. Its plane of its orbit would have to be close to the landing site. We can reverse engineer all of that. So we generally have an idea of what their claims could be for the landing and where to approximately look if the if the information they've shared is can be trusted um and i'm sure people will be looking uh very intently for it but you got to remember this thing impacted the moon at orbital velocity and may not have impacted the moon um in a way that like normally you would think where it just comes from outside of deep space and goes splat

into it and leaves a big crater it could have impacted the side of a crater or the side of a mountain or something like that where the evidence of it may be more obscure and difficult to see um you know etc who knows and it's also going at orbital velocity so it's just going to be like you know it could leave a crater um you know, and splat itself. But who knows, you know, and then you've got a wide range of area to search. And then unless it's like really obvious that it matches up to Russian data, it could have been something else to whatever you find, you know. And then there's a matter of like, is it even worth it for the LRO team to waste time trying to figure that out? It won't be the LRO team that's wasting their time.

You also got to remember that the Indians are rapidly taking lots of high resolution pictures with Chandra I and two up there. So there's two active missions photographing the moon at high resolution all the time. So, and there's a lot of amateurs, citizen scientists like myself, that sift through that data looking for it. So you can guarantee that there's going to be people looking. And they're not going to be on the payroll, per se. They're going to be looking. And hopefully, I actually hope they do find it. And that, you know, suddenly we're sending a message to the Russian government that if you're going to launch stuff like this, make it obvious.

Let us at least, you know know hear the radio emissions from it and track it um if you want to like make these claims about it you know we'll be happy to you know share what we see and confirm or deny what you're saying but if you're going to leave it to speculation and our imaginations then we have to roll back the clock when was the last time it was independently observed it was near earth so anything after that is all you know somebody choose your own adventure yeah yeah there's no independent um i don't want to keep it too long today so let me know if you've got a hard out but if you've got five minutes i'd love to hear what your thoughts are on something that seems to be coming out in the last couple days of people talking about the deep space network out but if you've got five minutes i'd love to hear what your thoughts are on something that seems to be coming out in the last couple days of people talking about the deep space network

and specifically uh the i forget what session this was in where this was coming out but uh it was it let me find a name suzanne dodd at jpl was talking about how during artemis one we cube sets that were flown the the infamous CubeSats that were flown alongside Artemis I, were quite a drain on the Deep Space Network during that mission. And even going back years, there was writing about the state of the Deep Space Network, both from an infrastructure perspective, budget perspective, and subscription time, really, that it's hitting a critical point that this is really not effective in the ways that it needs to be. There's obviously a lot of different options in

the industry right now for communications from space to Earth, but not of the same kind of style that the Deep Space Network is made for with these really huge dishes. I understand you might be acquiring some giant dishes in the near future. And it seems like if anyone has an extra dish, let Scott know in particular. But what do you make of this talk? Is it something that you have picked up on previous to this? Or is this a, you know, not a surprise surprise to you to hear? Yes and no. The Deep Space Network is a limited asset. NASA has a lot of missions that it tracks with it. The other side of it too is you often go to the Deep Space Network website and you can see that there's periods of time when the whole station is doing nothing. That could be because of maybe scheduling, national holidays. I have

no idea. But again, without seeing a full set of data of actually how this deep space network is utilized and sitting down and doing an analysis of like okay where are all these objects in space and how could you possibly schedule all of this you know there's there's a lot of complexity to probably how they have to do their scheduling and which it goes way beyond my pay grade. Having said that, it doesn't make a lot of sense to have some of the largest and most sensitive instruments on the Earth all aimed at the moon, following missions that you've planned for decades, like Artemis, when you could create a system of much smaller antenna. Now, the other side of the deep space network that is unspoken is it's not just the stuff you go when you go to see DSN now. There are other deep space antenna that are part of the network

that aren't on that, that can be tasked to missions. DSS-17, for example, is in Kentucky and was supposed to be, from my understanding, to be used for part of the Artemis mission. I know that it supported Capstone, which was launched just prior to Artemis. And if you go and look around the literature that you can find publicly on it, they were supposed to be providing support for the lunar missions. So again, I'm kind of, I'm of two minds about it. I can see you launch Artemis, which was already in and of itself was going to occupy a lot of attention from the deep space network. And then you glue a whole bunch of CubeSats to it and spew them out. You know, then you're going to have a

whole, and they're all going to need big antennas, because they're going to have very small transmitters and everything else. So they really needed the big antennas. Artemis itself probably could have been handled by much smaller aperture assets. But having said that, you know, yeah, it doesn't seem like they really fought that one through. And it seems kind of odd that, you know, they would go down the path of this. And then after the fact, realize that, you know, it seems like not so much a technical problem, it seems like a communication problem internally, about how to manage this. So I think in the in the bigger term, or longer term, I think NASA needs to figure out its communication issues internally about how

they plan the communications of these missions and not just leave it to JPL or whoever manages that at the very end to go, oh my goodness, we have a really hard schedule to figure out. And now we have things go wrong. And this is what happened with a lot of these CubeSats for various reasons. They didn't work right. So all of these missions declared spacecraft emergencies. What does that mean? Then the Deep Space Network is supposed to come to the rescue because that's the only way that you can come to the rescue.

You can't send the cavalry out there. You've got to aim the antenna at where you think the spacecraft emergency is and start spewing requests for it to talk or listening intently to see whether you get anything. So they did all of this and there were all these spacecraft emergencies. And this is why when I was down at JPL in February, one of the, I won't use his name, but one of the managers called the CubeSats vermin from their point of view, because it just occupied so much of their time and attention. And in their opinion, they were like low priority

compared to what the primary aim of the mission was. Now, I don't subscribe to the fact that the spacecraft were vermin. I can understand his point of view. But again, it didn't seem to me like somebody had actually thought through, and this seems very un-NASA-like, that somebody hadn't done some kind of risk analysis. What happens if these CubeSats don't function right? And we have multiple teams declaring spacecraft emergencies. How do we manage that with such limited assets and keep track of all the stuff that just routinely needs to be downloaded from and communicated with and all that kind of stuff.

So I think this raises, I think that report raises the awareness to the larger community. And I think this is the part, the beginning of a metamorphosis into a different way of dealing with deep space communication. My thinking on it is there's probably going to be a few different pillars of how to handle it. One, why are we launching a whole bunch of objects on one mission without a whole lot of care? Because you think about it for a second, they didn't seem to really give a crap about the CubeSats.

No, not at all. We're going to stuff them into the rocket. You're stuck in there now, buddies. If your batteries go dead, or blah, blah, blah, that's tough titty for you. They like talking about the existence of them more than the mission. It's huge in space, and you declare an emergency. Now you're our top priority.

We have to aim our most capable assets at you, and we're going to track you and figure you out. It just didn't make sense. That's true. If you're going to track you and figure you out it just didn't make sense true so if you're going to put this stuff on a rocket and send it into space then there needs to be some kind of like part of the specification of stuffing your cube sat into the rocket should be can it survive long delays in launch can the cube sat does it have the ability to do that? Have you tested it? You know, you know, put it on the, on the bench and tested it sitting there untouched, you know, unloved for a long

period of time. Is there a whole bunch of quality control checks that warrant if we do launch it in the space and a spacecraft emergency is declared to say that it's not some stupid thing you didn't do or you, because, oh, it's just a CubeSat. If it fails, no, no, we're going to divert a ton of attention to it because we've launched it. So that could be pillar number one. Pillar number two is why are we relying on the deep space network, for one, to communicate with the moon? The moon is relatively close. You can shrink down the apertures. And NASA already has a network, the Near Earth Network, that already routinely communicates with lunar missions, like LRO. There's another website that's kind of like part of the Deep Space Network website

where it actually shows you the Near Earth Network. And if you look there, all these little dishes suddenly pop up, and they're communicating with lunar missions. There's a few NASA lunar missions around the moon, not just LRO. There's two thermos satellites that are in orbit around the moon. They have very, very small transmitters and receivers on board, and they're communicating with these smaller assets as well. So where were they? Why aren't they maybe being used for Artemis, perhaps, you know, it could be because of the nature of the wide band communication

Artemis is using, they want to send huge amounts of data. And so they need the bigger dishes to facilitate that. But that doesn't necessarily mean that those those systems can't be used for the smaller assets, they're going to the moon. Right. Which there's going to be tons of, if everything goes well in the next couple of years with clips missions that are going to be in their landing phases,

but also hope to live longer than that. Not to mention as they build up infrastructure for Artemis, there's going to be cargo landers and things that are on the surface for longer periods of time. And then finally the last part would be, okay, you're going to send a whole bunch of stuff to the moon. A lot of this stuff is commercial. So why aren't we putting communications assets

at or around the moon and creating links and stuff like that to do it? It would seem like the first thing you should do before you send an armada of landers to the moon is to put a communication system in place that facilitates that armada of landers to the moon is to put a communication system in place that allows that that facilitates that armada of lunar exploration to occur and if your government is thinking okay we want to develop a trans-lunar economy then you would think that the government's first priority

would be we need to we need to facilitate the infrastructure to be there to allow this exploration to occur in an organized manner. You know, and most of it, I would imagine, because a lot of this is not just the United States doing it. It's countries have companies in Japan, Europe, and stuff like that that are all considering doing this kind of stuff. It would make sense to me that maybe they should get together and say, maybe, well, you know, the Chinese got something on the other side of the moon. Maybe we need one too. Maybe we need one at the Earth, sorry, the Earth-Moon L1 point in front of the moon, so we can have full coverage

of the lunar disk and anything in orbit around it. So that way, when we send these small assets to the moon to do these limited exploration missions, they don't need to be occupying, you know, large assets on earth, we can dedicate one or two assets on earth to just keep an eye on the communication satellites. And it keeps it, you know, yes, there's going to be some upfront costs, but the companies that launch this stuff, they shouldn't download that cost onto NASA, right, and the deep space network, they should be paying that cost. That's the cost of doing your work. And then if you profit from it, then you should be sharing some of that profit to maintain it.

Right. So that's the whole point. And again, if the government wants to, governments, these national space programs and everything else, they should be facilitating that infrastructure to be put in place. Rather than encouraging all these companies to create all these missions and flood the moon with all this traffic, and then it's just done in a helter-skelter way, occupying resources that are very thin, that had been highly managed to begin with.

All these big national space missions, they plan all this stuff. They think about it all. It's when they have these curveballs thrown up, you know, that could be quasi political or anything else that creates the dramas, I think. There are a couple of projects that I feel like are catching on in that way or have a potential to catch on in that way. I know Intuitive Machines has talked up putting up their own relay satellites to some extent to facilitate their missions. relay satellites to some extent to facilitate their missions the one that i find most interesting more in the vein that you're talking is the lockheed martin spin-off crescent space that they're talking about building a communications of its structure that they would then purely operate um which is interesting for lockheed to be doing it because you're like

well it's not exactly like the most forward-looking startup company that there's been in space recently so it's like all all right, are they, they have an inkling that this is kind of where, you know, where the puck is going and they're skating there first. Um, or, you know, are they beginning a lobbying effort to make this a program that's going to exist? It's very serious. Like, you know, these big companies, they're looking for a cashflow streams. You know, if you build an infrastructure like that, you know, it requires constant

inflow of cash flow to keep operational because not only do you have, you can't just put the satellites up there and not support them. So you need to have ground stations, at least three around the world that can communicate with these things constantly. So that would require infrastructure, cash flow, upgrades constantly to keep, you have to replenish the satellites, you'd have to maintain the ground stations,

you'd have to maintain staff and expertise to run the stuff. And you would probably need to be a well-heeled enough organization, like a big multinational company, to be able to staff and organize all of this, which I don't necessarily think big multinational company, to be able to staff and organize all of this, which I don't necessarily think one multinational company will end up doing. I think what will end up is it'll be a network of different organizations that contribute and there'll be standards in place and stuff like that. Just because of the nature, it's not one nation doing it all. But needless to say, I could see why a big company like lockheed

martin would look at something like this and say hmm there's there's a possible business angle to this and that's what we do we're more of a company to make money than we are to explore the universe and that's what we do if you're going to be the isp for a whole new planet then like sounds pretty good they probably have the expertise because they build all kinds of the fancy stuff for the military to do all this whiz bang high data rate, you know, communications that we can only possibly make our head spin kind of stuff that we only get a glimpse of in the commercial world. So I would imagine that these kind of companies would be very interested in something like that because there is, you a potential payoff for them and not just a one-off thing it's a it's a constant you know legitimate service that would have yeah huge revenue over the if you run it out a couple decades you can imagine the you know if the optimistic vision of what's coming is turns out to be true then you know like i said it also lends you know i hate to throw elon into this but what the heck are you

doing building starships with a big star dishes with x's painted on them to communicate with them once you get out to mars you know like you know what are you doing man you know you you need more boca chicas all the way around the world to put all your dishes to communicate with this fleet of starships um so again starlink is not going to work on the moon. All of the stuff that he's doing, unless he builds a Starlink around the moon. But yeah, again, when you start looking at the commercial interests in space, I think the government could rightly turn around and just say, look guys, build your own goddamn network. We're busy doing what we do. we will encourage you you know we'll create contracts and stuff like that to encourage the technology to get built but you know it's not our place to you know provide all

that stuff yeah you know it's it's kind of unusual that the united states government is in that position and you think about it like it's it's it's it's uh it's not really the thing they usually do is build the infrastructure to enable it's, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's not really the thing they usually do is build the infrastructure to enable. It's usually the government just encourages, you know, the industry, or if it's a military type situation dictates what's going to get built and then the military does, or the commercial interests do it. Um, and I think that's ultimately what will happen here is that, you know, if companies like SpaceX get successful with their starships and they're sending all this stuff out there, the government's basically going to say, OK, guys, you know, the free the free communications is over. You know, here's the bill or, you know, you know, you need to build your own. And invariably, that's what's going to happen if there's a commercial interest in doing it.

And invariably, that's what's going to happen if there's a commercial interest in doing it. And the thing about the Deep Space Network, it's, well, other than the people like me, it's not that sexy. You know, it's not like you put big dishes on the moon and they're doing exciting things. And, you know, it's a big, ugly dish in the middle of nowhere that's tracking some object and communicating with it. And unless you really understand what all that's about, it's not something that taxpayers would see a high value in. So it really needs to be tied into the whole project itself. And I think of the way NASA is going about encouraging all these private companies to do things, they need to look at,

okay, as part of this, you need to have your own communications network and make that part of the deal. You know, we can't infinitely supply you with, you know, high, high bandwidth communications anywhere in the solar system that you may want to go. Right. So, well, that was, I've kept you for way too long, I'm sure, but that was super enlightening. And I really appreciate your insight on it because you've got from what you do and what you track like such good insight on how this stuff goes down at a practical level that i feel like people do not talk about enough so very much appreciate you um if people don't follow along with what you're doing day to day where should they check you out um i'm on twitter uh coastal 8049 and um yeah check me out there or riddles in the sky um i periodically post a little bit more dialogue they're focused on particular things that

i happen to have a few nanoseconds to write down um but yeah twitter is the best place to go right now awesome they call it today yeah whatever the name is uh we'll have to have you back on off nominal soon to talk about some of the projects we're talking about before we hit record because you've got some interesting things coming up your way so uh lots going on yeah it's gonna be awesome but thanks again scott for hanging out this was awesome yeah thanks for having me thanks again to scott for coming on the show and uh spending so much time with us breaking down everything i feel like the insights on chandraran 3 were more than worth the show, but the Luna 25 stuff is just another level.

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