Neil Armstrong's wife finds priceless bag of missing space equipment

The ‘McDivitt purse’ and its contents had been lost for four decades.

Credit: Getty

The bag full of power cables and utility clamps may not have looked very interesting when Carol Armstrong found them stuffed in a closet in her Ohio home.

Yet the items, which had lain hidden for more than four decades, were actually priceless mementos from the most famous space mission of all, during which her husband became the first person to walk on the Moon.

The so-called “McDivitt purse” contained objects carried in the Eagle lunar module during the historic Apollo 11 mission, and included the camera that filmed Neil Armstrong’s descent on to the Moon’s surface on 20 July 1969.

Neil Armstrong’s McDivitt purse, stowed in the lunar module during Apollo 11. 

The white cloth bag was returned to Earth, despite being scheduled to remain on the moon, and was stashed in Armstrong’s closet until his death in 2012.

The objects, which were supposed to be left on the Moon so as to not add extra weight to their capsule on its launch off the lunar surface, will go on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum alongside other artefacts from the mission. Experts said they were “of priceless historical value”.

Mounted in the right-hand window of the lunar module Eagle, this Data Acquisition Camera filmed the first landing on the moon. 

Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin later repositioned it to film their work on the lunar surface.

Allan Needell, curator in the space history department at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, said: “Seeing such things with one’s own eyes helps us to appreciate that these accomplishments are not just books or movies but involve real people and real things, and that they involved an extraordinary amount of detailed engineering and planning”.

Ms Armstrong found the bag after her husband’s death in 2012 and emailed the curators saying it contained “assorted small items that looked like they may have come from a spacecraft”.

Mr Needell said: “For a curator of a collection of space artefacts, it is hard to imagine anything more exciting.”

A smiling Neil Armstrong in the Apollo 11's Lunar Module cabin after the EVA.

Credit: NASA

Among the 18 objects were cables, netting, mirrors and the waist tether Armstrong used.

There was also the 16mm camera which filmed the landing on the moon and the planting of the US flag, alongside a bracket for the camera, a 10mm lens and a lens shade.

They were put in the “purse”, named after Apollo 9 commander Jim McDivitt, who first suggested taking a spare bag to temporarily carry items, as there was no time to return them to storage.

A picture still survives of the bag in Buzz Aldrin’s hands in 1969.

Mr Needell said: “As far as we know, Neil has never discussed the existence of these items and no one else has seen them in the 45 years since he returned from the moon.”

Armstrong had not mentioned the items to his biographer James Hansen.

Two artifacts from the bag, the 16mm Data Acquisition Camera that was mounted in the window of the lunar module Eagle to capture the historic landing and a waist tether that Armstrong used to support his feet while briefly resting on the moon, are currently on display at the museum in a recently opened exhibition.

For more detailed information about the purse and its contents, head over to NASA.

ASTROBOTIC: Testing begins for real at Masten Space Systems

When Astrobotic's Griffin lander descends to the lunar surface, it will precisely target a small landing ellipse (a small area where it might land) and autonomously maneuver to avoid hazards such as rocks bigger than 25cm and slopes greater than 15. 

Last month Astrobotic introduced the landing sensor package and the concept of map registration - a technique that matches ("registers") a location in an in-flight image to the same location on a map.

Kevin Peterson

Now, an Astrobotic team led by Kevin Peterson is headed out to Masten Space Systems, located at the Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, CA, to fly the landing sensor package and software system on the Masten Xombie suborbital rocket.

This is the first of three flights on Masten's reusable launch vehicles - all made possible by a NASA Flight Opportunities award.

The first flight will operate the system in an open-loop mode, where Astrobotic's sensor package captures the same data it would use for an autonomous landing, but without actually controlling the vehicle.

The second and third flights, slated for later this spring, will be closed-loop flights where Astrobotic's landing software uses the sensor-package data in real time to guide the vehicle's landing.

Terrestrial simulation of the landing task requires creativity. Over the last year, Astrobotic has used a variety of test environments to exercise the landing system components and gather data about their operation.

Russia to Launch New Wave of Lunar Robots

The Luna Glob orbiter and lander are on Russia's flight schedule for moon exploration between 2015 and 2020. 

CREDIT: IKI

Russia is developing a renewed robotic moon exploration program, building upon the history-making legacy of orbiters, landers, rovers and sample-return missions the country launched decades ago.

Russia's rekindling of an aggressive moon exploration plan was unveiled by Igor Mitrofanov of the Institute for Space Research (IKI) in Moscow during Microsymposium 54 on "Lunar Farside and Poles — New Destinations for Exploration," held in The Woodlands, Texas, on March 16 and 17.

The microsymposium was co-sponsored by Brown University, Russia's Vernadsky Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the NASA Lunar Science Institute.

Notable lunar firsts
Russia launched its last moon mission in August 1976, when it was still the Soviet Union. That mission, called Luna 24, was the last in the Luna series and featured a spacecraft that landed on the moon and returned samples of the Mare Crisium (Sea of Crisis) region.

The former Soviet Union's robotic lunar program achieved a number of notable "firsts" on Earth's satellite, including; 

• the first spacecraft to impact the moon; 
• first flyby and photograph of the lunar farside;
• first soft landing on the lunar surface;
• first lunar orbiter; 
• first circumlunar probe to return to Earth; 
• first automatic return of lunar samples; and, of course, 
• the first moon rover Lunokhod.

Today, Russian space scientists are scripting a new plan to reconnect with the moon.

"Exploration of the moon is an important part of the program," Mitrofanov said. 'I just want to emphasize that Russia is a spacefaring country not only with the robotic but also manned flight."

Mitrofanov said that the lunar pole is a most favourable place for future outposts for humans in deep space and emphasized that moon exploration was a step toward future Mars journeys.

Nasa Robotic Lander "Mighty Eagle" - First Free Flight Test

Mighty Eagle during free flight. Credit: NASA/MSFC/Dennis Olive

NASA's robotic lander Mighty Eagle completed a successful free flight test September 5.

The prototype, using its onboard autonomous flight software, moved to an altitude of 100 feet, found its target and descended gently to a controlled landing.

The craft is named after a character from the popular Angry Birds game, and is a test bed for technologies that may be used to build robotic landers for the Moon, asteroids and other destinations in our Solar System.

"The Mighty Eagle had a great flight, fulfilling the objectives we had for this test - finding and landing on its target using a closed-loop system," said Dr Greg Chavers, lead engineer for the project.

Marshall Space Flight Center engineers Logan Kennedy, right, and Adam Lacock check out the lander prototype. Credit: NASA/MSFC/Fred Deaton

After a series of tethered flights during 2011 and 2012, the Mighty Eagle had its first "free" flight on August 8, 2012.

That test met with its targets and was followed by another successful untethered flight on August 16 when the lander hovered at an altitude of about 30 feet, identified its target landing site 21 feet away, moved sideways and descended safely.

The test flight lasted 32 seconds.

An infrared view of the "Mighty Eagle" taking off from the pad. (NASA/MSFC)

Read more about the NASA Mighty Eagle here, at the Lunar Quest mission website.

NASA’s Morpheus: Prototype Green Lander Explodes During Testing

The first freeflight of Nasa JSC's Morpheus LOX-Methane vertical takeoff, vertical landing rocket vehicle. It appears to have had a guidance failure. The heat of the methane burning then burst a LOX tank.

The lander flew a short distance before spinning head over tail and plummeting to the ground, where it burst into flame and exploded after about half a minute.

No one was injured during the testing of the lander, nicknamed ‘Morpheus’ after the Greek god of dreams.

The test would have marked the first solo flight of the 10-ft-long, 2,300 lb prototype.

NASA's Morpheus “was testing an engine that burned liquid oxygen and liquid methane, a technology NASA believed could benefit future landing or in-space propulsion systems.”

According to Jon Olansen, Morpheus’ project manager, the destruction of the craft, estimated to have cost about $500,000 was almost complete.

While the memory devices that could give a clue to what went wrong were successfully salvaged, in Olansen’s words, “The vehicle itself is lost.”

The team hopes to be able to gather enough data from the craft’s demise to be able to discover what went wrong during the test and fix it in any subsequent prototypes.

“We want to make sure that what we learn today gets applied to that next vehicle,” Olansen

NASA released a statement saying that failure is “part of the development process” and that they are confident the team will discover what’s wrong and fix the issue.

NASA LRO Image: Luna 24 Sitting On The Lunar Surface

Luna 24 landed on the northwestern rim of a 64 m diameter impact crater, on the volcanic plains of Mare Crisium. 

Enlargement of lander at lower left, NAC M174868307L 

Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Three Soviet missions (Luna 16, Luna 20, and Luna 24) successfully collected and returned pieces of the lunar surface.

Before the successful Luna 24 sample return mission in August 1976, Luna 23 was sent two years earlier (November 1974) to nearly the same location in Mare Crisium, but was unsuccessful.

Luna 24 landed in Mare Crisium on 18 August 1976 to complete the unfinished mission of Luna 23. The landing sites of Luna 23 and 24 are only 2.3 km apart.

The region of Mare Crisium where they landed is a typical smooth mare surface with little relief in the immediate vicinity.

There are numerous secondary craters scattered across the region, and Luna 24 landed on the edge of one of these.

The secondary craters are the result of an impact to the northeast of the landing site, perhaps from the crater Giordano Bruno, named after the Italian philosopher.

For More information and imagery.

ESA Human Spaceflight and Exploration - Astrium's Lunar lander firing up for touchdown

A test firing of Lunar Lander’s 220 N thrusters in Astrium’s specialised test facility in Lampoldshausen, Germany. 

The engines will guide Lunar Lander to a safe touchdown on the Moon. 

The thrusters have already flown on ESA’s series of Automated Transfer Vehicles. Tested for their new lunar role, they demonstrated excellent performance.

Credits: Astrium

Moon Express Lunar Ambitions

Moon Express, a privately funded company, is developing a robotic spacecraft to land on the moon.

CREDIT: Moon Express

When he's not acting as the CEO of Intelius, an information-services company, Naveen Jain dreams of one day being able to mine the moon.

In August 2010, Jain co-founded Moon Express, a privately funded company that aims to build and launch a robotic spacecraft to the moon.

The lander is being designed to carry up to 220 pounds (100 kilograms) of cargo to the lunar surface.

Moon Express is one of nearly 30 teams making a run at the $30 million Google Lunar X-Prize, which is a commercial race to land a homemade robot on the moon.

The company was already awarded a contract worth up to $10 million as part of NASA's Innovative Lunar Demonstration Data program. But Jain has his sights set on even loftier ambitions.

NASA - Apollo 16 Lunar Module 'Orion' seen from the Lunar Rover

The Apollo 16 Lunar Module "Orion" is photographed from a distance by astronaut Chares M. Duke Jr., Lunar Module pilot, aboard the moving Lunar Roving Vehicle.

Astronauts Duke and Commander John W. Young, were returning from the third Apollo 16 extravehicular activity (EVA-2).

The RCA colour television camera mounted on the LRV is in the foreground. A portion of the LRV's high-gain antenna is at top left.

Image Credit: NASA and Chares M. Duke Jr.

Lunar Probe to search for water on Moon

Luna-Glob will be the first sign of Russia's return to a comprehensive programme to study the Moon. 

The probe will be equipped with a radio beacon, which will help other probes to land on planned areas with great accuracy.

Russian scientists at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences have chosen six venues for landing the Luna-Glob probe.

With the launch of the probe in 2014, Russia will resume its Moon-exploration programme using automatic stations, which was started by Lunakhods several decades ago.

The Luna-Glob probe is designed for studying the Moon's Polar Regions where the environment differs from that in the territories which were studied by the Russian and American "Luna" and "Apollo" programmes.

During distance probing in the past years, signs of the presence of water on the Moon's surface have been discovered. Water in the form of ice exists in carters in the Polar Regions that are constantly in the sun's shadow. The pores of the moon's soil called lunar regolith are filled with water.

This is similar to the earth's permafrost and can be described as "lunar permafrost". The probe will study its properties using special equipment, which will assess the content of water in the soil. It has a mechanical hand to collect the samples of soil at depths up to two meters.

These samples will be analyzed in detail by equipment onboard the probe. The results will help to reveal from where water appeared on the Moon and also on the Earth because our planet was originally dry and hot, says a fellow at the institute Igor Mitrofanov.

"Possibly, comets brought water onto the Moon and also the Earth. There are two significant differences between the Earth and Moon. The Earth has a stronger gravitational field and a thick atmosphere. Owing to this the Earth could hold out, water and rivers, lakes and oceans appeared, and later, all this led to the origin of life.

"The Moon has no atmosphere and has a weak gravitational field. Water on its surface can be only under the conditions of extreme cold," says Igor Mitrofanov.

Water is necessary not only for research purposes. It is an important resource for the exploration of the Moon, which will be most likely started from the poles, says Igor Mitrofanov.

"When question arises about manned expeditions and setting up of lunar stations, water resources should guarantee the station with oxygen and water for day to day use and can be used to produce hydrogen, an excellent fuel for rockets. At present, we are engaged in hydrology surveillance for the exploration of the Moon in the future," Igor Mitrofanov said.

Luna-Glob will be the first sign of Russia's return to a comprehensive programme to study the Moon. The probe will be equipped with a radio beacon, which will help other probes to land on planned areas with great accuracy.

Several other missions, including the Luna-Resurs will start creating a robotized base on the Moon. This, on its part, will prepare everything necessary for landing a manned mission.

The Russian space exploration programme returns not only to the Moon but also to outer space. The "Phobos-Soil" mission will be launched shortly to study a moon of the planet Mars.

Moon Express Lander Development - The Prequel - YouTube

In this prequel to the Moon Express Lander Development webisodes, company co-founder & CEO Bob Richards narrates an overview of his Phoenix Mars Lander experience and the very different challenges of landing on the Moon.

The company is executing a technical strategy of developing and testing new landing technologies utilizing a rapid-prototyping Lander Test Vehicle platform in the adaptation of NASA's Common Spacecraft Bus to a lunar lander.

For the first time, Bob gives a public peak inside the project and the Hover Test Facility located a the NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley, California.

NASA's Next Generation Robotic Lander Gets Sideways During Test

During a recent test at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., the robotic lander prototype, known as Mighty Eagle, performed a hover test flying up to three feet and then translated, or moved itself sideways, to perform a controlled, safe landing 13 feet from the launch pad.

This is a complex manoeuvre for the lander to perform accurately since a robotic lander may need to right itself autonomously when it comes in for landing on an airless body or planet with no atmosphere.

The robotic lander team cancels out the Earth's gravity, which is six times the gravity a vehicle will experience on the moon, simulating a lunar environment by using a gravity cancelling thruster during test.

To initiate a test, the lander receives a command to activate its onboard thrusters and then follows a pre-programmed flight profile to carry it to a controlled landing.

This test demonstrated the robotic lander prototype's capability to autonomously translate sideways and then land while staying under control, and soon will be used to checkout landing control algorithms for the next generation of lander missions to the moon or other airless planetary bodies.

The Robotic Lander Development Project is a team of industry, government and not-for-profit collaborators, including the Marshall Center, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., and the Von Braun Center for Science and Innovation in Huntsville.

This team is designing and building the next generation of robotic landers that can carry a broad range of science payloads and devices, including geophysical measurement instruments, volatile measurement instruments or possibly lunar sample returns.

ESA: Europe’s vision: a leader in exploration

Lunar Lander idea from OHB Technology company

Several European industrial teams have already assessed the various mission options and designs.

The next step is ‘Phase-B1’, which will mature the mission and spacecraft design and examine in detail the demands of landing and working at specific southern sites.

This 18-month phase will begin this summer, taking the Lunar Lander from a design concept to hardware reality. The goal is for launch by the end of this decade.

Involving European researchers and industry is crucial for defining the detailed mission objectives and identifying instruments to address them. For instance, a request for information in 2009 produced more than 200 responses.

Lunar Lander idea from EADS Astrium company

As part of the process of involving European researchers and industry in the project, an information day will be held at ESA’s space research and technology centre (ESTEC) in the Netherlands on 14 April.

The day is aimed at those who responded to the 2009 request and will include an update on the mission outline, mission objectives and the model payload to be used for Phase-B1.

Further information on the information day can be obtained by contacting explorationcall@esa.int

ESA - Human Spaceflight and Exploration - Fly us to the Moon…south pole to be precise

ESA - Human Spaceflight and Exploration - Fly us to the Moon…south pole to be precise



The south polar region of the Moon, with dark craters and high ridges, is a world away from the relatively smooth terrain visited by Apollo astronauts four decades ago. This rugged moonscape is the target for Europe’s next leap into space.

The possible deposits of water ice, heavily cratered terrain and long periods of sunlight make the lunar south pole and areas around it extremely interesting for explorers and scientists. It is therefore a prime target for future human missions to the Moon.

Europe is now looking at a lander mission to pave the way for astronauts. This precursor would be the first European Moonlander and the first to visit the south polar region.

ESA is now asking industry to submit proposals for this Lunar Lander mission.

Moon produces its own water

The Moon is a big sponge that absorbs electrically charged particles given out by the Sun. These particles interact with the oxygen present in some dust grains on the lunar surface, producing water. This discovery, made by the ESA-ISRO instrument SARA onboard the Indian Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, confirms how water is likely being created on the lunar surface.

It also gives scientists an ingenious new way to take images of the Moon and any other airless body in the Solar System.

The lunar surface is a loose collection of irregular dust grains, known as regolith. Incoming particles should be trapped in the spaces between the grains and absorbed. When this happens to protons they are expected to interact with the oxygen in the lunar regolith to produce hydroxyl and water. The signature for these molecules was recently found and reported by Chandrayaan-1’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument team.

The SARA results confirm that solar hydrogen nuclei are indeed being absorbed by the lunar regolith but also highlight a mystery: not every proton is absorbed. One out of every five rebounds into space. In the process, the proton joins with an electron to become an atom of hydrogen. “We didn’t expect to see this at all,” says Stas Barabash, Swedish Institute of Space Physics, who is the European Principal Investigator for the Sub-keV Atom Reflecting Analyzer (SARA) instrument, which made the discovery.

NASA: New Robotic Lunar lander Test Bed on Demo

Marshall Space Flight Center is testing a new robotic lunar lander test bed that will aid in the development of a new generation of multi-use landers for robotic space exploration.

The test article is equipped with thrusters that guide the lander, one set of which controls the vehicle's attitude that directs the altitude and landing.

On the test lander, an additional thruster offsets the effect of Earth’s gravity so that the other thrusters can operate as they would in a lunar environment. MSFC is partnered with John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the Von Braun Center for Science and Innovation for this project.

Image Credit: NASA