Another reason to share this is I wish for more publishers, writers, and creators to reveal beforehand if they have any such vested interests. As a reader and friend aptly reminded me recently, none of us can be unbiased but we can always be transparent about our associations and thought processes. Having stated my position, I can now continue my blunt coverage. :)

There’s a lot riding on Odysseus for Intuitive Machines and NASA

On February 15, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched and deployed Intuitive Machines’ first lunar lander called Odysseus. The lander then established communications to Earth via its commercially availed ground stations, and the company later successfully fired Odysseus’ methalox-powered main engine, including testing its throttling—which needs to work later during landing to dynamically course correct the lander’s trajectory as needed. Next up, the 4-meter tall, six-legged Odysseus will fire its engine on February 21 to attempt getting into a 100-kilometer circular lunar orbit. After operational checkouts, Odysseus will attempt an autonomous landing on February 22 at the near-polar Malapert A crater at 80°S.

The mission, named IM-1, carries six NASA science & technology payloads as part of the agency’s CLPS program and several commercial payloads too. The Space Investor noted how Intuitive Machines’ stock surged after IM-1’s successful launch and commissioning. While the lander has been performing well so far, until Odysseus begins and completes its one-shot landing attempt, its engineers won’t know if their design and testing was appropriate. The lunar descent is the true litmus test of a lander, one where the recent past doesn’t paint a pretty picture:

• The previous three non-governmental Moon landings have failed; namely Israel-based SpaceIL’s Beresheet, ispace Japan’s Hakuto-R, and US-based Astrobotic’s Peregrine.
• Even when including national successes, failed lunar landing missions in the past five years total a five out of nine.

NASA has invested in CLPS as a “shots on goal” approach to lunar surface exploration but even then back-to-back failures of Odysseus and Peregrine would greatly reduce the chances of the 10-year, $2.6 billion program getting extended or renewed in a good capacity. And if Odysseus makes it to the Moon unscathed, and I really hope it does, there’s reason to celebrate but remember that the success rate of autonomous lunar landings in the past five years would squarely be 50%.

NASA has purchased rides for its experiments on two more Moon missions by Intuitive Machines: one to the south pole and the other to the magnetic swirl of Reiner Gamma. A successful touchdown of Odysseus would certainly bode well for both NASA and Intuitive Machines. The company not only also has some commercial customers aboard these later missions but is looking for more. But a failure would be deteriorating, especially in the absence of more CLPS flights.

The point of this perspective isn’t to bring down the exploratory spirits but to state that even a successful Odysseus still means that we’ve barely begun adapting ourselves to the harsh realities of Luna. That even as lunar ambitions skyrocket worldwide, having robotic landers touchdown by themselves remain a coin flip. There is much to do still.

Chandrayaan 3’s touchdown has induced confidence that a country other than China can autonomously land things on the Moon too. JAXA’s SLIM reinforced that for the most part while opening up a new, necessary frontier of precision landing. Odysseus has the opportunity to build on them and be the one that tipped us against a world stuck in occasional Moonshots.

Many thanks to Epsilon3, Gurbir Singh and Arun Raghavan for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love my work too, join them!

Reaching out for lunar resources

• The Honeybee-Robotics-provided TRIDENT drill is the fourth and final instrument to be tested and integrated into NASA’s upcoming VIPER CLPS rover. While VIPER was nominally being planned for a November 2024 launch to the Moon’s south pole onboard Astrobotic’s Griffin lander, Astrobotic’s failed lunar mission last month might induce delays. VIPER intends to explore areas in and around permanently shadowed regions for over four months to unravel the nature of the Moon’s water ice deposits, assess their resource potential, and help determine how accessible they are. This will help NASA plan crewed Artemis missions.
• An interesting bit in NASA’s update above on TRIDENT being integrated into VIPER is that the one-meter drill also carries a temperature sensor, which has additional value. Recall that India’s Chandrayaan 3 lander inserted a thermal probe to about nine centimeters into the surface to provide the first pristine near-subsurface lunar soil temperature measurements. Combining this data with that of TRIDENT will help scientists understand exactly how the Sun’s heat propagates downwards from the surface, determine the thermal conductivity of the near-polar and polar lunar soil, and from it infer its density and physical properties to help us know stability zones of lunar water.
• On February 14, the UK Space Agency announced £1.5 million in funding to a team led by the University of Leicester, who will develop a laser-based Raman spectroscope to fly onboard an unspecified future lander and rover by private company ispace Japan with the goal of locating water ice and other resources on the Moon’s south pole.
• UKSA will also fund Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL) with £306,000 to develop software for ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter to help its multi-band radar better detect underground water ice on the Moon’s south pole. UKSA, RHUL, and ISRO hope to use the same advancement for mapping Venus in high resolution using the radar on India’s upcoming Shukrayaan orbiter. Shukrayaan is not yet a commissioned mission from the Government of India, and might not launch before end of decade.

More Moon

• On February 15, Uruguay became the 36th country and the sixth Latin American nation to sign the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration. The other Latin American signatories are Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, and Ecuador. Interestingly, the latter three are members of the recently formed “Latin American and Caribbean Space Agency”, or ALCE. Inspired in part by the model of the European Space Agency, ALCE aims to pool resources of Latin American nations to better their space activities and its impact. Uruguay, however, is not an ALCE member at the moment. This might change once the country establishes its own national space agency soon.
• IAA is organizing an international symposium on March 21 and 22 dedicated to protecting the radio-quiet lunar farside for its unique importance to cosmology, chiefly in that it’s the only place in the inner Solar System that provides a view into our Universe’s ‘Dark Age’—a slice of time right before the first stars were born. The symposium is in-person but key sessions will be streamed on YouTube.
• NASA got the iconic worm logo painted on hardware elements of Artemis II, which will push four astronauts around the Moon and back no earlier than September 2025. In the meanwhile, NASA finished making the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen tanks of the core stage of the SLS rocket which will push astronauts to the Moon for the Artemis III crewed landing mission no earlier than late 2026.

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SpaceX and Intuitive Machines are targeting a Falcon 9 rocket launch of the latter’s first Moon lander during a three-day window opening on February 14 at 5:57 UTC. The mission, named IM-1, will carry six NASA science & technology payloads as part of the agency’s CLPS program. These include a radio beacon and a LiDAR to help test advanced navigation technologies for future Moon landers. If all goes to plan, IM-1 will attempt to land on Luna on February 22 at the near-polar site of the Malapert A crater at 80°S.

To follow IM-1 developments, see NASA’s dedicated webpage and my rundown on how to follow everything CLPS.

IM-1 will also carry a separate, commercial telescope called ILO-X from Hawaii-based International Lunar Observatory Association. While CLPS competitor Astrobotic’s first lunar landing mission failed last month, Intuitive Machines has continued to show confidence in their attempt. The public company earlier told Jeff Foust of SpaceNews that they have studied recent failed Moon landing attempts to subdue similar weaknesses in their lander, such as having dissimilar redundant inertial measurement units—the lack of which afflicted the lunar descent of Israel-based SpaceIL’s Beresheet lander.

But the fact remains that five out of the past nine lunar landing missions have failed. Even as lunar ambitions skyrocket worldwide, having a robotic lander touchdown by itself remains a daunting undertaking. Until IM-1 is aloft, its engineers will not really know if their testing regime was appropriate. In a feature piece for Nature, I explain the key tests and challenges engineers face in preparing a lander for Luna:

Also related: Past mistakes to avoid in our grand return to the Moon this decade

As urged by NASA for CLPS, Intuitive Machines signed multiple agreements over the years to get commercial Earth communications services for IM-1 to avoid further straining the precious but limited bandwidth of the agency’s Deep Space Network. Relatedly, Intuitive Machines has been progressing well towards its second Moon landing mission, which is also part of CLPS.

Betting on Lunar Starship

OffWorld and Astrolab are among the handful of companies creating for the Moon with a bet on SpaceX’s Starship bringing about a paradigm shift in launch mass and volume. With support from ESA and the Luxembourg Space Agency, OffWorld aims to send a large, autonomy-capable rover on a Lunar Starship no earlier than 2027 which will specifically locate and process water-ice containing soil at the Moon’s south pole as a demonstration. OffWorld hopes to send swarms of such rovers in the future, all working in tandem to extract and process lunar resources at scale.

Astrolab aims to send its first lunar rover called FLEX on a 2026 Starship launch, carrying at least eight payloads worth $160 million. With a large payload capacity of up to 1,000 kilograms, FLEX sports essentially the same design that Astrolab pitched to NASA last year for the agency’s request for a versatile Lunar Terrain Vehicle, which will be used across Artemis missions starting Artemis V for more than 10 years.

Relatedly, Interlune—a mostly quiet startup founded over three years ago by several former Blue Origin employees—raised $15.6 million to develop lunar resource extraction technologies. Interlune seems to particularly focus on developing an efficient method to sort lunar material by particle size, which in turn would allow faster passing over of feedstock into systems extracting oxygen on the Moon.

Thank you to Epsilon3 and The Orbital Index for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love my work too, join them to support this project.

More Moon

• Axiom Space and NASA continue to test the core AxEMU suit design astronauts will wear during the crewed Artemis III lunar surface mission later this decade. Chosen competitively, the AxEMU suits offer enhanced mobility, upgraded insulation and cooling for the harsh lunar polar environment, and more such niceties compared to the current EMU suits used in Earth orbit. The latest series of tests concerned how well the suit is allowing astronauts to perform tasks related to handling samples on the Moon.
• Greece became the 35th country and 13th ESA member to sign the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration.
• To prepare Artemis astronauts to explore the rocky, impact-cratered terrain at the Moon’s south pole, the Lunar and Planetary Institute and NASA have published a book which captures lessons from investigations of cratered lunar areas by Apollo astronauts. The book can be read and downloaded for free.
• How India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter helped Japan’s SLIM craft nail its Moon landing 📌

Speaking at ESA

It was an honor and a pleasure to deliver a talk on Chandrayaan 3 and India’s lunar ambitions at ESTEC, Netherlands last month at the invitation of the European Space Agency. To be honest, as an independent space writer with barely any resources, I never thought such a day would come. Many thanks to Francesco Liucci and team for being kind and helpful hosts. Attached below are my talk slides. Also see key takeaways from this Space for Inspiration event as posted by ESA.

Jatan Mehta on Chandrayaan 3 and Indian lunar exploration | Space For Inspiration 2024, ESA ESTEC13.6MB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownload

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Four out of the past eight Moon landing attempts have failed. Even as lunar ambitions skyrocket worldwide, having a robotic lander touchdown by itself remains a daunting undertaking. Until a spacecraft is aloft, engineers never really know if their testing regime was appropriate. In this feature piece for Nature, I explain the key tests and challenges engineers face in preparing a lander for Luna:

Related articles I’ve written previously:

• Past mistakes to avoid in our grand return to the Moon this decade
• A brief history of space missions lost to human errors
• Space grade electronics: How NASA Juno survives near Jupiter

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SLIM

Japan’s SLIM lunar lander entered sleep mode on January 31, two days after it woke up when pre-dusk sunlight struck its solar panels from the west. Like Chandrayaan 3, SLIM wasn’t designed to survive the frigid lunar night, when temperatures can plunge below -100° Celsius. JAXA will nevertheless attempt to wake up SLIM the next lunar day in mid-February just in case serendipity awaits.

In its two days of operations, SLIM analyzed the composition of rocks and soil at 13 locations using a near-infrared multi-band spectroscopic camera, which will inform scientists about the landing site’s formation, and possibly that of our Moon’s mantle too. In any case, SLIM has gone down in history as the most precise robotic planetary landing ever, which has big implications for future lunar exploration. 📌

CAPSTONE

The NASA-funded and Advanced Space-led CAPSTONE lunar orbiter has been continuing to cross-communicate with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) for demonstrating autonomous navigation in lunar orbit, that is, without relying on Earthly ground stations. Being able to autonomously determine position and navigation states means future lunar satellites can operate more efficiently by not blocking as much of the precious but limited bandwidth of NASA’s Deep Space Network or other such ground stations.

Relatedly, NASA funded Advanced Space last year to develop a mission design and planning tool which will increase the autonomy and safety of lunarbound spacecraft along various trajectories. This tool would also benefit crewed missions such as those under Artemis. Another way CAPSTONE is proving useful to NASA is it’s test-flying the same fuel-efficient Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit to be flown by the NASA-led international Gateway lunar orbital habitat later this decade. The CAPSTONE team has been publishing some papers to that end.

Queqiao 2

The flight hardware of China’s Queqiao 2 lunar orbiter arrived at the Wenchang spaceport on February 2, CGTN reports. Andrew Jones says CNSA intends to launch the communications orbiter on a Long March 8 rocket as early as this month. Queqiao 2’s 4.2-meter wide parabolic antenna will relay communications between Earth and CNSA’s upcoming lunar missions, including the Chang’e 6 sample return craft and the Change’e 7 & 8 landers. Zhang Tong reports that Queqiao 2 will also deploy two experimental Tiandu CubeSats to test and verify technologies to be fed into the Queqiao constellation—an upcoming lunar navigation and communications service similar to ESA’s Moonlight project.

Relatedly, Andrew Jones reported last month that the four key modules of the 8200-kilogram Chang’e 6 Mooncraft arrived at China’s Wenchang spaceport on January 10. CNSA aims to launch Chang’e 6 on a Long March 5 rocket this May to bring about two kilograms of lunar samples from the Apollo impact crater on the Moon’s farside. These samples should be scientifically even more valuable than the Chang’e 5 samples as it would be our first tactile window into our Moon’s mysterious farside.

A gist of Gateway science

An armada of international instruments by NASA, ESA, and JAXA on the upcoming Gateway lunar orbital habitat will advance the lunar radiation-characterizing research as initiated with NASA’s Artemis I. They will also be the first space weather monitoring platforms on a crew-hosting spacecraft that’s outside Earth’s protective magnetic field.

NASA will mount the HERMES instrument suite outside the Gateway to monitor the continuous stream of charged particles coming from the Sun called the solar wind. HERMES will also take radiation and magnetic field measurements when the Moon passes through the tail of Earth’s magnetic field. This will allow NASA to combine its observations with two nearby THEMIS spacecraft sporting similar instruments, and thus reconstruct changes in the solar wind with time.

For higher energy radiation measurements, there will be ESA’s instrument suite ERSA mounted on the Gateway. ERSA will not only measure higher energy particles in the solar wind but also galactic cosmic rays. ESA, in collaboration with JAXA, will supply a suite of dosimeters inside the Gateway’s habitat module HALO to monitor solar and cosmic radiation from within the station, which will help assess requirements for the safety of astronauts on future Moon missions. Together, these instruments will provide us a fuller picture of the space weather conditions and ergo crew protection necessities near Luna. 🧑🏽‍🚀

In addition to the aforementioned instruments, here’s a quick refresher of other upcoming known scientific contributions to the Gateway.

• Because Canada is contributing the Canadarm3 robotics servicing system to the Gateway, the country has secured not just astronaut seats aboard but also dedicated time to perform science & technology experiments. The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) previously funded seven biology-related experiments totaling $1.25 million to be on the Gateway. Then, in March 2023, CSA announced it will invest $76.5 million over eight years in Canada-led Gateway experiments. Canadarm3 will help install and support scientific instruments on the Gateway.
• In parallel, ESA has continued expanding its “SciSpacE” program to fund more science on and around the Moon, with a focus on the Gateway. Separately, ESA has asked researchers in June 2022 across its member (and affiliated) states to submit lunar science payload proposals that can be developed for launch within three years of an identified flight opportunity. ESA has now shortlisted four proposals to consider further for launch, likely on a NASA-funded CLPS lander.

Related: China’s Chang’e 4 lander and rover on the Moon’s farside produced two prominent results on long-term lunar radiation measurements:

• First measurements of low-energy cosmic rays on the surface of the lunar farside from Chang’E-4 mission
• Energetic Neutral Atom Distribution on the Lunar Surface and Its Relationship with Solar Wind Conditions

Thank you to Epsilon3 and Open Lunar Foundation for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love my work too, join them to support this project.

More Moon

• As Step #2 in a series of seven tests, NASA is prepping and enhancing dozens of high-speed film & digital cameras to record and document the launch of the second SLS rocket in late 2025, which will push four astronauts towards the Moon on the Artemis II mission. On that note, maybe relive some beautiful views from the Artemis I launch.
• The Planetary Science Journal published a special edition dedicated to LRO, which is a collection of open access papers showcasing the venerable orbiter’s wide impact on lunar and planetary science.
• Relatedly, JPL is hiring a postdoctoral research associate to utilize LRO’s radiometer data to better understand the Moon’s thermophysical dynamics, including (past) volcanism.

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XPoSat gazes at cosmic objects from space

On January 1, ISRO’s PSLV rocket launched India’s second space telescope called the X-ray Polarimetry Satellite, or XPoSat. While the country’s first space telescope, AstroSat, observes high energy cosmic objects in multiple wavelengths, the smaller XPoSat is more specialized and focuses on better analyzing just the X-rays emitted by cosmic objects.

XSPECT, one of the two instruments onboard XPoSat, already began observations, starting with first light from the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. Built by the Space Astronomy Group at ISRO’s U R Rao Satellite Centre (URSC), XPSECT will conduct long-term spectral as well as time-varying measurements of cosmic objects that emit lower-energy X-rays called soft X-rays. XSPECT is expected to study X-ray emissions from black hole binaries too.

For hard X-rays, there’s XPoSat’s polarimeter called POLIX built by the Raman Research Institute. In particular, POLIX will study the polarization of X-rays emitted by cosmic objects, which will uniquely inform scientists about the physical nature of those objects—such as the strength and distribution of their magnetic fields. NASA launched the IXPE space telescope on a similar mission in December 2021. IXPE and XPoSat are the world’s only telescopes dedicated for said purpose. When scientists are able to utilize and combine data from both telescopes, we will get first or better polarization measurements for many bright X-ray sources, including pulsars, binary stars, and galactic cores.

ISRO has a good blog post on some of the physics behind XPoSat as well as on how its instruments evolved.

Aditya-L1 begins its solar staring

India’s first space-based solar observatory called Aditya-L1 launched in September 2023 to uniquely study our Sun with its advanced set of seven indigenously developed instruments. In early January, it had reached the region of the first Sun-Earth Lagrangian point (L1), where the gravitational pull of the two bodies roughly balance. On January 6, ISRO commanded Aditya-L1 to fire its thrusters and successfully enter a 178-day halo-orbit around the L1 point. This will allow Aditya-L1 to continually study the Sun for five years with minimal station keeping.

While formal science observations will begin from around April after all operational checkouts are complete, Aditya-L1 has already returned first observations of solar flares in high energy X-rays, captured unique, full-disk ultraviolet images of the Sun’s “surface” and inner atmosphere, measured charged particles from the solar wind, and deployed its patented magnetometer boom.

AstroSat has been a space science success for India, with its more than 150 cited research results in reputed international journals. If Aditya-L1 and XPoSat are able to follow suit, it would bode well for India’s still growing space science efforts.

Related tangent: SatSure (parent company of KaleidEO, a sponsor of Indian Space Progress) has a detailed blog post with real life examples on how solar weather monitoring missions like Aditya-L1 uniquely expand the life span of satellites in Earth orbit.

Chandrayaan updates as India continues exploring the Moon

• India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s CLASS instrument team released the largest and highest-resolution X-ray mapping of the Moon’s surface elements using orbital data collected over three years. Previously, CLASS provided us with the first ever global-scale sodium maps of Luna, sensed Chromium in its volcanic soil, and even detected energetic events from the Sun. Studying these datasets is unraveling specifics of how our Moon evolved and helping scientists constrain the lunar crust’s composition.
• On December 12, 2023, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) successfully laser-pinged the agency-provided small retroreflector sitting on top of ISRO’s Chandrayaan 3 lander. This first-of-a-kind demonstration is a stepping stone towards a future where Mooncraft with purpose-built lasers can locate such targets and land near them as they arrive. For example, this technique will be relevant for repeated cargo deliveries near future habitats.
• In another trick up its sleeve, ISRO pulled the Chandrayaan 3 lunar orbiter back to Earth orbit.
• In a symposium talk last November, ISRO Chief S. Somanath highlighted some key tentative missions and elements from an increasingly complex roadmap that will feed into and enable the new national goal of sending an Indian to the Moon by 2040. These include the Indo-Japanese LUPEX rover and the Chandrayaan 4 sample return missions before end of decade, a Chandrayaan 5 mission with the ability to survive the lunar night, a resource extraction and utilization demonstration with Chandrayaan 6, a crewed lunar cruiser docking with the NASA-led Gateway international orbital habitat (just as I had predicted!), a partially reusable Next Generation Launch Vehicle (NGLV), and more.

Many thanks to the Takshashila Institution, SkyServe, KaleidEO and Gurbir Singh for sponsoring this month’s Indian Space Progress report.

Some Earth observation updates from ISRO and the private sector

• Following the release of India’s much-awaited new space policy early last year, in December ISRO opened up access to 5-meter resolution remote sensing data from 44 of its satellites, making it among the highest resolution datasets of its kind in the world available to the public. Shyam Upadhyay has great coverage on its technicalities, and Vishesh Vatsal of SkyServe (a sponsor of Indian Space Progress) illustrates its potential with an example instrument from ISRO’s ResourceSat-2. Also see Bhoonidhi’s first newsletter of 2024 for more details.
• Pixxel Space, headquartered in the US but with a major Indian presence, opened up a 2800 square-meter manufacturing and testing facility in Bangalore with the hope of eventually building and qualifying up to 40 satellites a year. The announcement comes shortly after Pixxel recently closed a Google-led $36 million funding round, bringing the total money raised by the company to at least $71 million. The company is targeting launching six commercial hyperspectral Earth imaging satellites in late 2024.
• Satellogic is entering the Indian market via a partnership with Tata Advanced Systems Limited to build sub-meter resolution Earth observation satellites locally in the country for commercial as well as national defense applications.
• Ahmedabad-based PierSight Space raised $6 million to work towards its goal of building a constellation of SAR satellites aimed at providing a high 30-minute interval monitoring for the maritime industry.

More Indian space

• On the same launch as XPoSat, ISRO once again uniquely repurposed the PSLV’s fourth stage as a stabilized, solar-powered platform for onboard payloads. Called the PSLV Orbital Experimental Module or POEM, this platform affords organizations low-cost access to space for demonstrating their technologies ahead of use in future missions. On this launch, POEM hosted nine payloads from various organizations, including green thrusters from startup Bellatrix and the LEAP satellite platform demonstration from the private company Dhruva Space. POEM also successfully demoed ISRO’s own high density Lithium-ion batteries and a fuel cell with the hope of using their core technologies in future satellites and space stations.
• Hyderabad-based Skyroot raised $27.5 million, and hopes to launch their first orbital rocket Vikram-I later this year. The company previously launched suborbital test mission Prarambh in November 2022, becoming India’s first such privately developed rocket. In July, the company completed the carbon-fiber winding and curing of the rocket’s Stage-1 motor case. In June, Skyroot flight qualified its Raman-I engine, which will provide roll attitude control for Vikram-I. Also in July, the company successfully tested at an ISRO facility the first hot firing of its Raman-II engine, which will power Vikram-I’s fourth stage. In December, Skyroot passed pressure testing of Vikram-I’s first stage.

Reading menu

• Looking back at Chandrayaan 1 and forward to Artemis
• India’s Chandrayaan 2 lunar orbiter is also a Sun watcher

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SLIM is alive, and its landing is remarkable in more ways than one

On January 25, JAXA provided a detailed rundown of how the lunar landing of its SLIM spacecraft went on January 19. During its final phase of the descent when SLIM was roughly 50 meters above the lunar surface, it hovered for a second time and successfully identified touchdown hazards below it to start lowering itself accordingly. But at this point, one of the two main engine nozzles on the lander mysteriously broke off and fell (image). This reduced the lander’s thrust level to 55%, and made it go sideways. Since then, the latter issue had to be continually kept in control by SLIM’s guidance system using the other main engine and smaller thrusters.

SLIM touched down on the Moon at 13.316°S, 25.251°E, lying within the rocky ejecta of the 300-meter wide Shioli crater. While its vertical velocity of 1.4 meters/second on touchdown was well within the designed upper bound, the eastward lateral motion and touchdown orientation weren’t nominal, causing SLIM to flip on the surface with its solar panels facing away from the Sun.

SLIM explores Selene

SLIM woke up today, January 29, after the Sun lit the lander’s solar panels from the west. JAXA wasted no time to begin conducting its surface mission of analyzing the composition of Shioli crater’s ejecta using a near-infrared, multi-band spectroscopic camera, which might give scientists insights about our Moon’s mantle and its formation. When SLIM was briefly operational post-landing, JAXA imaged parts of the surface using the instrument, and mission scientists even identified specific rock targets to spectrally analyze if and when the lander woke up—which it now has. Here’s hoping JAXA can get a lot of the surface science mission done before the Sun sets for it on February 2.

The two small “Lunar Excursion Vehicles”, or LEVs, that SLIM deployed during descent at about five meters altitude have also demonstrated their abilities. JAXA said the two-kilogram LEV-1 hopper leaped on the Moon as planned, and directly communicated with Earthly ground stations, which made it the world’s smallest and lightest hardware to directly transmit data from Luna to Terra. The 250-gram, tennis-ball-sized crawler called LEV-2 also worked, and relayed an image of the flipped SLIM lander via LEV-1, providing us all a clear visual confirmation of the landing’s climax.

A new era of robotic surface science and exploration

Remarkably, because SLIM had been acing its lunar descent until the point at which it lost an engine nozzle, the spacecraft achieved its ‘pinpoint landing’ goal anyway by landing 55 meters from the center of its incredibly tight landing ellipse of 100 by 100 meters. JAXA says without the engine anomaly, SLIM could’ve touched down at least five times closer! In any case, SLIM goes down in history as the most precise robotic planetary landing ever. As covered in the previous Moon Monday, this has implications for more demanding future missions by Japan, India, and the US to explore the Moon’s rocky south pole and better access nearby water ice lying inside permanently shadowed regions. Just as importantly though, SLIM’s success will now lead to sophisticated surface science missions too:

• For example, scientists asserted in 2021 that due to scientific instruments becoming increasingly sophisticated, even low-cost robotic surface missions—and specifically those without sample return or crew—can help answer fundamental lunar & planetary science questions by focusing on precisely measuring trace elements. However, the generally immobile landers post touchdown and limited drive ranges of small rovers have kept such instruments from being right on or near the scientifically apt patches as identified from orbital data. With SLIM-like precision landings, that’s now possible.
• Such precision landings will also enhance robotic sample return missions, where retrievals like in the case of China’s Chang’e 5 mission have otherwise accepted higher tolerances in landing accuracies. Robotic missions can now have better chances of bringing material to Earth that have high fidelity to precise scientific objectives, such as, say, bringing home the Moon’s mantle material.

Many thanks to Epsilon3, Nathan Price and Ashish Gupta for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love my work too, join them!

How India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter helped SLIM nail the landing

At the heart of SLIM’s precision landing ability is what JAXA calls “vision-based navigation”, wherein it compares images of the Moon it snaps at critical points during its descent to preloaded onboard orbital maps within just a few seconds to know where it is and to determine where it needs to go. These maps come from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, and JAXA’s own SELENE craft, each uniquely useful at various heights.

During the January 25 press conference, JAXA said that the SLIM mission used high-resolution imagery from the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter for selecting the final target landing site pre-launch as well as for the lander’s final descent phase. This is because the orbiter boasts an imaging resolution in the range of 0.25–0.30 meters/pixel, which is roughly twice LRO’s finest. Such high resolution is useful in the final descent phase where otherwise standard orbital maps are rendered less useful for a lander now too close to the surface. While most modern robotic landers, including most recently India’s own Chandrayaan 3, can find a good landing spot on their own in this final phase, the lack of a relevant last-mile map can affect the landing precision.

SLIM’s case highlights how India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter can provide advanced orbital data to help NASA and its partners better plan upcoming robotic & crewed Artemis missions. This has largely remained an untapped opportunity despite a formal report from US scientists recognizing the orbiter’s unique ability. There have been a handful of exceptions though, such as a NASA-ISRO team utilizing the orbiter’s radar to uniquely characterize the Artemis III candidate landing regions. At the last annual meeting of the NASA-backed Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) in September 2023, LRO project scientist and Science Lead for Artemis III, Noah Petro, said:

The Chandrayaan 2 orbiter is a valuable asset at the Moon. Its data is helping build on the LRO foundation by filling important needs, and we’re very much looking forward to more data from the mission!

More mission updates

• SpaceX and Intuitive Machines are targeting launch of the latter’s first Moon lander on February 14. The mission, named IM-1, will carry six NASA science & technology payloads as part of CLPS. A separate, commercial telescope called ILO-X from Hawaii-based ILOA will also be aboard. While CLPS competitor Astrobotic’s first lunar landing mission failed earlier this month, Intuitive Machines has continued to show confidence in their attempt. The company earlier told Jeff Foust of SpaceNews that they have studied recent failed Moon landing attempts to subdue any similar weaknesses in their lander, such as having dissimilar redundant inertial measurement units—the lack of which afflicted the lunar descent of Israel-based SpaceIL’s Beresheet lander.
• NASA’s decision to launch the upcoming US-led Gateway international lunar orbital station’s habitat module mated to its power & propulsion one led to some mass constraints, which combined with evolving Gateway requirements from NASA have resulted in habitat module contractor Northrop Grumman taking a $100 million hit out of a $935 million fixed-price contract, Jeff Foust reports.

More Moon

• Belgium became the 34th country and the 13th European nation to sign the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration. Jeff Foust notes that Belgium is the fifth largest contributor to ESA, after Germany, France, Italy, and the UK. As such, all these contributors are now signees of the Accords.
• To achieve the ambitious Artemis Moon landing missions for NASA, both SpaceX and Blue Origin must prevent cryogenic fuels in their respective lunar craft from boiling off in the weeks and even months they spend in cislunar space. They must also be able to accurately assess the remaining fuel at any given point in time, a task made challenging due to lack of gravity. To improve fuel estimations, NASA says it will soon fly an agency-developed radio-based gauging technique on an unspecified upcoming Moon lander from Intuitive Machines as part of CLPS.
• New research from Western University discovered the mineral apatite in a meteorite sample once part of the old crust of our Moon. This reinforces the recently developed idea that the young Moon may have had considerably more water than what the Apollo sample findings suggest.

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Another reason to share this is I wish for more publishers, writers, and creators to reveal beforehand if they have any such vested interests. As a reader and friend aptly reminded me recently, none of us can be unbiased but we can always be transparent about our associations and thought processes. Having stated my position, I can now continue my blunt coverage. :)

There’s a lot riding on Odysseus for Intuitive Machines and NASA

Success criteria of Intuitive Machines’ first lunar landing attempt IM-1, as set by the company. Image: Intuitive Machines

On February 15, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched and deployed Intuitive Machines’ first lunar lander called Odysseus. The lander then established communications to Earth via its commercially availed ground stations, and the company later successfully fired Odysseus’ methalox-powered main engine, including testing its throttling—which needs to work later during landing to dynamically course correct the lander’s trajectory as needed. Next up, the 4-meter tall, six-legged Odysseus will fire its engine on February 21 to attempt getting into a 100-kilometer circular lunar orbit. After operational checkouts, Odysseus will attempt an autonomous landing on February 22 at the near-polar Malapert A crater at 80°S.

The mission, named IM-1, carries six NASA science & technology payloads as part of the agency’s CLPS program and several commercial payloads too. The Space Investor noted how Intuitive Machines’ stock surged after IM-1’s successful launch and commissioning. While the lander has been performing well so far, until Odysseus begins and completes its one-shot landing attempt, its engineers won’t know if their design and testing was appropriate. The lunar descent is the true litmus test of a lander, one where the recent past doesn’t paint a pretty picture:

• The previous three non-governmental Moon landings have failed; namely Israel-based SpaceIL’s Beresheet, ispace Japan’s Hakuto-R, and US-based Astrobotic’s Peregrine.

• Even when including national successes, failed lunar landing missions in the past five years total a five out of nine.

NASA has invested in CLPS as a “shots on goal” approach to lunar surface exploration but even then back-to-back failures of Odysseus and Peregrine would greatly reduce the chances of the 10-year, $2.6 billion program getting extended or renewed in a good capacity. And if Odysseus makes it to the Moon unscathed, and I really hope it does, there’s reason to celebrate but remember that the success rate of autonomous lunar landings in the past five years would squarely be 50%.

NASA has purchased rides for its experiments on two more Moon missions by Intuitive Machines: one to the south pole and the other to the magnetic swirl of Reiner Gamma. A successful touchdown of Odysseus would certainly bode well for both NASA and Intuitive Machines. The company not only also has some commercial customers aboard these later missions but is looking for more. But a failure would be deteriorating, especially in the absence of more CLPS flights.

The point of this perspective isn’t to bring down the exploratory spirits but to state that even a successful Odysseus still means that we’ve barely begun adapting ourselves to the harsh realities of Luna. That even as lunar ambitions skyrocket worldwide, having robotic landers touchdown by themselves remain a coin flip. There is much to do still.

Chandrayaan 3’s touchdown has induced confidence that a country other than China can autonomously land things on the Moon too. JAXA’s SLIM reinforced that for the most part while opening up a new, necessary frontier of precision landing. Odysseus has the opportunity to build on them and be the one that tipped us against a world stuck in occasional Moonshots.

Many thanks to Epsilon3, Gurbir Singh and Arun Raghavan for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love my work too, join them!

Reaching out for lunar resources

Illustration of the VIPER rover exploring the Moon’s south pole. Image: NASA

• The Honeybee-Robotics-provided TRIDENT drill is the fourth and final instrument to be tested and integrated into NASA’s upcoming VIPER CLPS rover. While VIPER was nominally being planned for a November 2024 launch to the Moon’s south pole onboard Astrobotic’s Griffin lander, Astrobotic’s failed lunar mission last month might induce delays. VIPER intends to explore areas in and around permanently shadowed regions for over four months to unravel the nature of the Moon’s water ice deposits, assess their resource potential, and help determine how accessible they are. This will help NASA plan crewed Artemis missions.

• An interesting bit in NASA’s update above on TRIDENT being integrated into VIPER is that the one-meter drill also carries a temperature sensor, which has additional value. Recall that India’s Chandrayaan 3 lander inserted a thermal probe to about nine centimeters into the surface to provide the first pristine near-subsurface lunar soil temperature measurements. Combining this data with that of TRIDENT will help scientists understand exactly how the Sun’s heat propagates downwards from the surface, determine the thermal conductivity of the near-polar and polar lunar soil, and from it infer its density and physical properties to help us know stability zones of lunar water.

• On February 14, the UK Space Agency announced £1.5 million in funding to a team led by the University of Leicester, who will develop a laser-based Raman spectroscope to fly onboard an unspecified future lander and rover by private company ispace Japan with the goal of locating water ice and other resources on the Moon’s south pole.

• UKSA will also fund Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL) with £306,000 to develop software for ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter to help its multi-band radar better detect underground water ice on the Moon’s south pole. UKSA, RHUL, and ISRO hope to use the same advancement for mapping Venus in high resolution using the radar on India’s upcoming Shukrayaan orbiter. Shukrayaan is not yet a commissioned mission from the Government of India, and might not launch before end of decade.

The most plausible locations of water ice within the polar Peary crater, as mapped by the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s radar. Image: ISRO

More Moon

• On February 15, Uruguay became the 36th country and the sixth Latin American nation to sign the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration. The other Latin American signatories are Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, and Ecuador. Interestingly, the latter three are members of the recently formed “Latin American and Caribbean Space Agency”, or ALCE. Inspired in part by the model of the European Space Agency, ALCE aims to pool resources of Latin American nations to better their space activities and its impact. Uruguay, however, is not an ALCE member at the moment. This might change once the country establishes its own national space agency soon.

• IAA is organizing an international symposium on March 21 and 22 dedicated to protecting the radio-quiet lunar farside for its unique importance to cosmology, chiefly in that it’s the only place in the inner Solar System that provides a view into our Universe’s ‘Dark Age’—a slice of time right before the first stars were born. The symposium is in-person but key sessions will be streamed on YouTube.

• NASA got the iconic worm logo painted on hardware elements of Artemis II, which will push four astronauts around the Moon and back no earlier than September 2025. In the meanwhile, NASA finished making the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen tanks of the core stage of the SLS rocket which will push astronauts to the Moon for the Artemis III crewed landing mission no earlier than late 2026.

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• Big Fedi and Small Fedi, by Evan Prodromou
• A Round Robin of sign-up servers to prevent too much centralization
• Nodes versus Networked Communities, by L. Rhodes
• Fedipact, to preemptively block Meta’s Threads from federating
• Paradox of tolerance
• Moderate people, not code, by Ryan Barrett

I first visited the Central Museum, which hosts unique Paleolithic tools natively excavated from Madhya Pradesh.

In the same vein, the museum hosts artifacts of an independent Bronze age civilization in Madhya Pradesh from Kayatha and Avara (modern day Mandsaur).

The museum also had an intriguing 5th century painting from the Bagh caves depicting a folk dance being performed by women.

The museum’s gallery of inscriptions displayed a copper plate which references a solar eclipse.

I then visited the Holkar clan’s Rajwada palace and its gallery, owing to the clan’s significant role across the Mughal-Maratha-British eras in central India.

I then walked up to the Sheesh Mahal, a Jain temple made largely of glass and collage-esque mirror pieces, including the large paintings that adorn its also-mirrored walls. Sadly, photography isn’t allowed in there so I couldn’t take any pictures. If the relevant stakeholders want more people to appreciate the beauty of the temple’s build, they should change their policy to allow mobile photography at the very least.

I also stopped by the Gandhi Hall and Lotus lake. The former was hosting an exhibition on coins that I had no interest in. The latter neither had a lake nor lotuses. My plan to sunset the tour with a sunset had to be set aside.

I enjoyed some street food during transits, after learning to avoid the incredibly spicy stuff the locals have a knack for. I quite liked the ginger tea served at various street shops. Using Uber and Ola to travel in autos & mini-autos was reliable and affordable, which included a couple of nice electric rides. It was great to see the city host dedicated lanes for AC buses in some areas to encourage public transport. Though I didn’t need to board one. It’s a service I appreciate though when I visit Ahmedabad, and wish Bengaluru had it too.

In all, it was a day well spent with no undesired humans to spoil the plan and its execution.

Writing is the most radical thing you can do without money.

– Julian Shapiro

No one human can fight a flawed system but only humans can fight the system.

– Mukunth

Tech enthusiasm is a rabbit hole.

– Rushabh Gala

Hope, such a deceptive little thing.

– Jyotsna Vibhuti

Reading really calmed me down.

– Dhanisha, a friend who shares the trait to that end.

With infinite curiosity, ascent never stops.

– Maciej Zborowski

Reading can seriously damage your ignorance.

– Unknown

Words carry the weight of their past usage.

– Jamie Rumbelow

An intimate relation is lost not in the most intense of fights but when you can no longer share a moment of joy.

– Yours truly

Quit being so available.

– Annie Mueller in Big things and tiny things

Look up and wonder, or we die.

– Yours truly

People in bliss seldom think about the ones who aren’t.

– Yours truly

Thank you for sharing your words with me.

This is something a friend told me at the end of our first interaction, and it stuck.

I add more quotes here as and when I find ones that feel just as intriguing or resonating. I’d love to hear your most cherished words.

Sometimes a beautiful sunset on a lake is all it takes to be happy.

The post reminded me of my article exploring the possibilities of life on starless worlds. I can’t help but wonder about the incredible views they would miss. I’m fully aware I’m coming across as anthropocentric here but I’m a human after all. The serenity of sunsets and sunrises that our Earth and solar system are capable of producing really does make me happy.

It really made me wonder about how capitalist consumerism has left us with fewer and fewer public spaces to just exist in. “Work cafés” keep creeping in while tax-funded productive spaces decline. The former tend to be both noisy and expensive while the latter have neither by definition.

What kind of a world are we building? What are we conditioning ourselves to?

Aside: If I may complain about that particular library though, it would be that they don’t provide charging points or Wi-Fi. However, both these things could be worked around, and so for a free service I don’t see it as a bummer. I can even understand not wanting to provide free Wi-Fi but I do hope they consider charging points in the future.

I purchased six double-walled steel cups three years ago, and I’ve never gone back to drinking things in ceramics or glass. Here’s why.

1. Even when my beverage is really hot, the cup’s insulating layer of air between its outer and inner steel wall makes things pleasant warm to hold on the outside.
2. The same design keeps the beverage inside hotter for longer. This is good if you’re a slow drinker, the kind who likes to sip and enjoy your beverage while working or relaxing.
3. For cold beverages such as cold coffee, the cold metal inner wall feel pleasant to the tongue.
4. A steel cup is child-proof. Adult-proof too.
5. No leaking liquids from the bottom of the cup, as is the case of ceramics. Avoid table and cloth stains by design.
6. It’s not gimmicky or at least not over-engineered like the active temperature control mugs. It just works passively on the reliable laws of physics.

Aside: In August 2022, I stumbled upon a glass equivalent.

I dislike ceramics and glass because they’re fragile and thermally terrible. I don’t care that they look pretty. But this one could be a good middle ground for those who don’t find the look and feel of steel aesthetically appealing.

First off, as you probably know, here’s me in my natural habitat—exploring corners of the Internet regardless of where I’m physically at.

Here’s what I look like as a human being in favorable lighting.

Below are some of my traits and idiosyncrasies.

• I’m asocial i.e. not even introverted. Even with friends, I absolutely do not like the idea of meeting them often, talking on the phone frequently or for long even if infrequently, being part of chat groups, and so on.
• Minimalist.
• Love being peak productive.
• Can’t say no to tea and vada pav.
• Have more blogs than (good) friends.
• That being said, I’m truly grateful to the few people who decide to stick with me anyway.
• Get really annoyed by nearly all animations and glittery nonsense on “modern” websites, apps and operating systems. I religiously disable every possible such thing.
• How modern social networks are intentionally engineered to exploit people’s behavior depresses me.
• Love playing badminton.
• Don’t like taking pictures of humans but love to snap things such as intricate insects and beautiful flowers. The unadulterated joy of kids are an exception to the former.
• I once participated in a Photoblogging challenge.
• Love having food at indie places, and prefer supporting them with my wallet rather than pleasing corporate franchises whenever possible.
• Really like double-walled steel cups for consuming beverages.
• Incapable of posting even something casual in an unorganized way.

That is all.

Day 5: Earth

Day 6: Silhouette

Day 12: Tranquility

Day 13: Community

Day 15: Clouds

Day 16: Time

Day 19: Indulgence

Day 20: Beverage

Day 21: Symmetry

Day 24: Intricate

This prompt was suggested by me!

Day 25: Mountain

Day 26: Schedule

Day 28: Fair

Day 31: Endurance

This prompt was suggested by me as well.

That’s all folks!

Hope you enjoyed the pictures. I know I had fun posting them. You can browse all photos posted by all participants in the Micro.blog May Photoblogging challenge on a cool grid at micro.blog/discover/mbmay/grid. Some of them are really creative.

The idea is simple: If indulging in something is positive long-term, repeatedly keep trying to do that over things that provide instant gratification but aren’t healthy in the long run. So here’s a simple Yes and No page, partly inspired by Julian’s website, that reflects my priorities, and captures my life philosophy in general.

Don’t judge. Instead, take from it what you can.

Yes

• Read articles instead of browsing posts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or any social media.
• Write blogs instead of frequently tweeting or posting on social media.
• Respond, don’t react. Whenever possible, I iterate on my reaction to something important for 12-24 hours before talking about it. Applies to work emails too.
• Rest, chat, walk, or sleep instead of binge watching movies, shows, or TV. I only watch any of the latter things when I’m eating, with rare exceptions for movies.
• Use RSS/Feed Readers to follow websites and blogs, instead of getting news and information from Google, Facebook, or Twitter, who serve biased thought bubbles to drive engagement for ads, not expand your horizons. An RSS/feed reader also allows me to keep track of more than 150 sites with incredible efficiency. I use the amazing Feedbin as my reader and highly recommend it.
• Apple Mac and iPhone instead of Windows/Linux and Android respectively. It’s a pragmatic choice to strike a balance between an excellent user experience, safeguarding my digital privacy, and not wasting my time fiddling with endless toggles, or obsessing over ideologies.
• Say no to people. Social and professional connections aren’t always a positive. They can be a real drag if you try to stay nice to them all the time.
• Reader- and sponsor-supported writing over ads or tracking. It’s the right thing to do, and it incentivizes me to produce better quality writing.
• Minimal (modern) lifestyle needs in general. Good for me, and Earth.
• Pay for quality digital work, especially by indie folks. Demanding that everything on the Internet be free is ridiculous, and won’t sustain good things.
• Domains and websites instead of using closed platforms for sharing my work and thoughts so I can own my digital identity.
• Tea or Coffee instead of alcohol, smoking, or cold drinks.
• Poems and cards instead of giving material gifts of consumerism.
• Memes that are snarky or wholesome, but not outright disrespectful or low effort. I even make original space memes.
• Pizzas, Subway sandwiches, and Vada Pavs because a human needs to be happy.

No

Note: I’m only human, so I’m not always successful in not doing these things but the binary system keeps me on track overall.

• Digital nonsense: A modern phone is a stress-giving machine that wants to grab my attention all the time. Here’s how I deal with it. Just say no to:
  • Notifications and badges: My default is to deny notifications of any kind to all apps except communication aspects of critical work or social apps. Even then, I keep sound, vibration, and banner pings off.
  • Apps: Most services have perfectly functional websites. Installing apps for almost everything would mean I’m giving them increasing opportunities to indulge me. I only keep about 20-25% of the apps people typically do on average.
  • Read receipts: For most things, it doesn’t matter if and when someone reads my message. People will reply anyway if and when they want to. Read receipts are stress builders, and enable others to interrogate me about the most mundane things, so I just turn them off wherever possible.
  • Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or any network that makes me a slave of the attention economy, and is actively against an Open Web.
• Activities. Don’t indulge in:
  • Being awake overnight: I’m not a kid anymore, shouldn’t mess with the biological system in the name of fun.
  • Music: No reason, just not my thing.
  • Shopping and discount-buying: Consumerism exists to keep selling me stuff. By falling for discount shopping, I’ll spend more for things I likely didn’t need in the first place, one after another. The trick is to simply not shop generally, and set spare spending limits for when I do.
  • Long novels, to avoid indulging in an eerily specific work that has little lifetime value to me beyond gratification in the present.
  • Games, to avoid seeking life satisfaction in virtual realities. Only exceptions are games played in small social groups.
• Complaining or feeling bad about (impartial) successes of others.
• Videos and podcasts to consume information. They’re great mediums for many things, including entertainment, but are fundamentally poor for referencing, quoting, or looking up specific information. This is a hill I’m willing to die on.
• Writing in the passive voice: Unlearning academic writing, which is unnecessarily complex, was one of the best things I did in life.
• Calling: I prefer text for most communications as it can be silent and asynchronous, and doesn’t abruptly demand my undivided attention.
• Birthdays, anniversaries, and all such days of social celebration with little meaning to me. Besides, these days people connect with hundreds of people, which means everyday it will be someone’s birthday, anniversary, or whatnot.
• Privacy-invading software; use any sane pro-privacy ones instead. I also default to not providing any app permissions to most apps unless it absolutely blocks a core function. Much the same for giving away private information to services.
• Generalizing and stereotyping: This isn’t fully possible. I’m as flawed a human as any, constrained by my experiences and upbringing. But I try to avoid actively generalizing and stereotyping people and their communities.
• Telling bad things to people during or after conflicts. Instead, I’m learning to say why something didn’t work for me. Dragging conflicts is a persistent brain drain.

Never

These “Nos” I’ve been successful at never doing. So I’m putting them in a hall of fame for a little self pat on the back. :)

• Write clickbait articles. It’s harder to avoid than it may seem.
• Celebrity anything
• WhatsApp forwards, reading or sending them.
• Astrology, Homeopathy or any Pseudoscience
• Nationalism
• Fanboy-ism of any person, company, product, or brand. Successful at not doing it since becoming a working adult.

I hope this binary system helps you be more productive. I will update this blog post as and when I remember more things or develop new habits.

If you create such a list too, I’d like it if you share it with me.

Here are some of the actual significant differences between the M1 MacBook Air and the Surface Laptop 4.

1. Surface Laptop 4 has an 10-11 hour real world battery life whereas the M1 MacBook Air runs for 14-17 hours. Note that Microsoft claims 19 hours of maximum battery life for their laptop and Apple claims 18 hours. One of them is lying badly.
2. The M1 MacBook Air has a better speaker, inbuilt microphone and camera than the Surface Laptop 4, which especially matters in this day and age of working from home and remotely.
3. Surface's Ryzen 5 processor turned out to be worse than I thought. It doesn’t even have the latest Ryzen chipset. The Apple M1 outperforms it by a mile not just in CPU processing but also by over 2x in the graphics department. Reviewers have also said the Surface Laptop 4 heated up easily despite having a fan. Whereas M1 literally remains cool to the touch despite performing heavy tasks thanks to its superior processor.
4. The USB-C port on the Surface Laptop 4 is basic, not the much higher speed transfer supporting “Thunderbolt” port that the MacBook has. This matters not just for transferring files but also for things you might connect your laptop to, such as external monitors or HDMI connections for presentations.
5. Surface laptops have a proprietary charging port, as opposed to the standard USB-C charging on MacBooks. This means that if your Surface charger stops working, you will need to shell out over $250. Sure, a MacBook charger isn't cheap either, because Apple, but it's half the price of the Surface one. Also, since a MacBook has USB-C charging, you can use any other compatible USB-C charger you have on hand too, not just Apple's own.

To make things worse for the Surface Laptop 4, it costs roughly $150-200 more than the M1 MacBook Air. Choose wisely.

1. On a Mac, you’d need to buy Microsoft Office, yes.
2. But on Windows, depending on which laptop you purchase, you either buy it as part of the laptop price or you get a 1-year free license and then have to pay to continue using it after that period. Either way, you do technically pay for Microsoft Office on Windows too.
3. A Mac comes with Apple's own suite of Office-compatible iWork software at no extra charge. But opinions on it are polarized so you’ll likely either find it to be a useful replacement of Office or you’ll hate it.
4. Either way, if your work doesn't involve heavy and advanced usage of Microsoft Office specifically, then you can use many simpler but fairly functional and free alternatives, which work with Office files, such as Google Docs, Microsoft's own Office Online or apps like ONLYOFFICE Desktop.

Personally I use Google Docs and ONLYOFFICE, and so I don't need to pay for Microsoft Office or use Apple's Office apps.

1. Do not post or share things on social platforms, especially short takes, just to show that you care or are in the know. Vet a source before you do share something important. Despite what it seems like, reacting immediately is more likely to fuel more issues than solve them.
2. Identify something specific you can do to help in a tangible way. For most people, it isn’t a tweet or two. For example, I’m dissatisfied with the fact that my country abstained the UN Security Council’s call for an emergency session of the General Assembly on the conflict in Ukraine. Before you judge though, you should read up on India’s history of relations with all countries involved. Nevertheless, I’m personally not happy with my country’s overall response, and the one thing I could do as an observer is support relief efforts for people displaced from their homes. The UN Refugee Agency is accepting donations specifically to provide basic life-saving protection to families forced to leave their homes. Please consider doing so too if that’s the best you can do.

Take a moment to acknowledge the freedom that you have, and act where it counts.