The Indian Area Analysis Organisation published overdue closing week that its Chandrayaan-2 moon orbiter has two times maneuvered to steer clear of possible collisions with identical craft.
The Indian craft raised its orbit on September 19 – two weeks prior to it might have made an uncomfortably shut come across with Korea’s Danuri spacecraft, in line with the Indian area company’s per month abstract document [PDF].
Whilst the collision-avoidance maneuver effectively allowed the gap businesses to flee an excessively pricey fender-bender, a 2d maneuver used to be vital – and used to be made on October 1 – to steer clear of collision with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).
The 3 spacecraft all use orbits that move over the Moon’s poles.
The LRO’s orbit is extremely elliptical across the Moon, with a median altitude of about 50km, because it circulates to survey all the lunar floor and seek for water, ice and different assets.
Danuri research the lunar floor, additionally taking a look at water and ice, from round 100km.
Chandrayaan additionally operates at 100km, from the place it maps the lunar floor and conducts thermal imaging. Once more, the objective is accumulating knowledge on water and ice.
There is no formal protocol for when the orbits intersect. Dodging affects will depend on collaboration between the gap orgs – on this case NASA, ISRO and Korea Aerospace Analysis Institute (KARI).
And close to collisions do happen.
ISRO performed every other maneuver simply days prior to it decreased Chandrayaan-2. The company’s document additionally unearths that on September 16 it moved its Cartosat-2A Earth statement satellite tv for pc to steer clear of an in depth method with Russian rocket frame SL-14.
As for Danuri, additionally continuously referred to as the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO), it racked up over 40 possible collision warnings between February 2023 and Would possibly 2024.
“We observe collision chances day-to-day in the course of the Multimission Automatic Deepspace Conjunction Review Procedure (MADCAP) document supplied by means of NASA JPL,” defined [PDF] KARI previous this 12 months.
“Collision avoidance maneuvers require gasoline intake and transient suspension of a few payload missions, which might result in variations in opinion relating to who will have to elevate them out,” the company added. ®
