[HN Gopher] ESA's Moonlight programme: Pioneering the path for l...
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ESA's Moonlight programme: Pioneering the path for lunar
exploration (2024)
Author : nullhole
Score : 77 points
Date : 2025-07-14 14:01 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.esa.int)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.esa.int)
| CharlesXY wrote:
| Honestly, pleasantly surprised that this is a European-led
| initiative, it's really great to see ESA stepping up with such an
| ambitious project.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| _Mostly_ European. The ESA map has a little cutout for the one
| non-european "cooperator" state on the council.
|
| https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Corporate_news/Member_States_Co...
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| Canada is currently pretending to be a European country sssh
| saubeidl wrote:
| We'll annex them before the Americans do!
| preisschild wrote:
| For Canada we can rename the EU to just "the Union" or even
| "The United States" :)
| JLemay wrote:
| I mean it sounds great for materials extraction, but I'm a bit
| skeptical on infrastructure that will make long-term
| exploration and a lunar economy actually viable
| saubeidl wrote:
| ESA is leading the way in a bunch of space stuff - we're not
| great at launchers, but the stuff we send up is top-notch.
|
| There's Euclid, which maps out the visible sky in insane detail
| [0]
|
| There's Galileo, which provides much higher accuracy than GPS.
| (20cm vs 5m!)
|
| And then there's Copernicus, which provides open-access Earth
| Observation as a public good.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86ZCsUfgLRQ
| snickerbockers wrote:
| >There's Galileo, which provides much higher accuracy than
| GPS. (20cm vs 5m!)
|
| Very ironic name for a group of satellites orbiting the
| earth.
| BigChemical wrote:
| The Moonlight programme is one of those low-key projects that
| could end up being essential. Reliable navigation and comms
| around the Moon turns exploration into long-term infrastructure.
| It's less about planting flags, more about making the Moon
| actually usable.
| jcfrei wrote:
| I mean, kudos to ESA for already thinking about connectivity on
| the moon. But maybe a bit more pressing would be the launch of
| IRIS2, so we get at least sovereign satellite based
| telecommunications in Europe. It's set to launch with the first
| rockets in 2029 but the full budget post 2027 hasn't even been
| approved yet.
| verzali wrote:
| IRIS2 is a European Union project, not an ESA project.
| Different organisations, purposes, and countries.
| preisschild wrote:
| Thats not really true. IRIS^2 is a joint project between the
| EUSPA and ESA
|
| > The European Space Agency (ESA) is responsible for
| development and deployment of the system and the European
| Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA) is responsible
| for the governmental service provision.
|
| The ESA wants to be the "space agency" of the European Union
| anyways
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIS%C2%B2
| delijati wrote:
| Delta-V or better the second book critical mass from Daniel
| Suarez.
| ragebol wrote:
| The navigation part will be of great use to landers there, I've
| heard too often that the ground sensing radars lock on too late
| to help guide the landing. Getting a good location estimate might
| relieve some of that pressure.
|
| For recent landers also didn't really know where exactly they
| landed, only after getting spotted in images taken from orbit
| sandworm101 wrote:
| No. It is a fundamental data problem relating to sensor
| accuracy/precision. They are called "suicide burns" for a
| reason. Start the burn too late and you run out of time and
| smash into the ground. Start too early and you run out of fuel
| and smash into the ground. So you need a sensor with error bars
| similar to your safety window for the planned burn.
|
| Let's say you need to start the burn within a +/-10m box to
| come to a stop 1 to 21m above the moon surface. You want a
| sensor with something at least 10m precision but preferably
| more like 1m. That would be the radar. But then say you have
| something like a GPS with +/-100m precision. Does that help?
| Your safe window is somewhere inside that 200m but you cannot
| be sure where until the radar comes online. So do you use the
| +/-100m info from the GPS? Do you maneuver to center yourself
| inside its error bars? All you can be sure of is that you are
| somewhere within that 200m and are 95% sure you are not within
| the 10m window. So you make a maneuver anyway. Are you now in
| any better an information position? No. You are still somewhere
| in the 200m box and are still very likely outside the 10m box.
| Heck, you might have been inside the 10m box and just moved
| yourself out of it. You just wasted fuel. The only logical
| thing to do is to ignore the GPS and wait for the
| better/actionable information from the radar. The GPS may give
| you a warm fuzzy but it doesn't actually help when you only
| have one shot at the burn.
|
| (This problem is mirrored in areas like missile guidance.
| Running parallel sensors on a missile sounds like a good idea
| but in reality leads to confusion, wasted energy/range and
| reduced chance of getting to the target.)
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Not that I doubt your conclusions necessarily, but isn't this
| what sensor fusion is _for_? You can cast it as sensor
| "selection", which is fine, but given two sensors that show
| 10/1 accuracy (variance 100:1), and the estimates are
| consistent, I don't know why you'd expect it to have
| divergent results. (Am I understanding the problem here?).
| Your pos/alt is still measurable but with big old error bars
| until the precise sensors kick in.
| nullhole wrote:
| That's roughly my understanding.
|
| Worth noting too that your original, pre-LPS[1]
| position/orientation/trajectory is coming from other
| sensors with their own error bars, namely your IMU and
| whatever information the ground can glean from radio
| signals.
|
| If your LPS accuracy is better than your IMU accuracy, I
| don't see why it wouldn't make sense to start using it once
| it's available.
|
| [1] gotta call it something and GPS doesn't really fit
| sandworm101 wrote:
| You can only fuse sensors that are online. In the recent
| crashes the radar wasn't. The point is that you cannot swap
| out a high accuracy sensor, not when doing suicide burns
| with zero margin.
| ragebol wrote:
| My case was about not having radar at all. Having GPS could
| buy you some time and start braking already based on GPS even
| if the radar is still out. Yes, might burn some additional
| fuel but burning too late sucks harder I suppose.
|
| Also: even tough I couldn't find anything about the
| navigation (or rather localization?) accuracy of the
| Moonlight system, I'd expect it to be better than 100m, but I
| have nothing to confirm or deny this.
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