Lunar regolith is a layer of loosely-packed rocky grains deposited on the lunar surface, whose physical and chemical properties are important for deciphering the geologic history and formulating lunar spacecraft design. Probing the thermal conductivity of the lunar regolith has drawn a lot of attention since the Apollo era. Early measurements focused on the Apollo regolith samples, but the experimental data were available only at a few landing sites at the nearside.

The CE-4 spacecraft landed at 45.4446°S, 177.5991°E, on the floor of Von Kármán crater, on January 3rd, 2019. After landing, the Yutu-2 rover was released via the deployed two rails.

A spacecraft attitude kinematics model, attitude measurement model, and filter algorithm are three important parts in spacecraft attitude determination, and a high-precision filtering algorithm is the key to attitude determination. The classical sigma-point Kalman filter (SPKF) is widely used in a spacecraft state estimation area with the Gaussian white noise hypothesis.

Although the SPKF algorithm performs well in ideal Gaussian white noise, the actual operating conditions of the spacecraft in orbit are complicated. Space environmental interference, solar panel jitter, and flicker noise will make the noise no longer meet the Gaussian distribution and present a heavy-tailed non-Gaussian situation, where the classical SPKF filtering method is no longer applicable, and there will be obvious accuracy degradation or even filtering divergence.

In a research paper recently published in Space: Science & Technology, a joint team from the Army Engineering University of PLA and Chinese Academy of Military Science, proposed a robust Centered Error Entropy Unscented Kalman Filter (CEEUKF) algorithm by combining the deterministic sampling criterion with the centered error entropy criterion.

When NASA's Artemis 1 lunar mission takes off on August 29, on board will be four science experiments—including one from Canada.

UBC pharmaceutical sciences professor Dr. Corey Nislow is sending yeast and algae cultures into space, in a pod not much bigger than a shoebox, to study the effects of cosmic rays and near zero gravity on living organisms.

When the spacecraft returns after its uncrewed 42-day orbit around the Moon, Dr. Nislow will get his samples back, along with the information they contain.

In this Q&A, he explains what the NASA project could mean for medical advances on Earth and in space.

What is it exactly that you're sending into to space, and why?

We chose to study Chlamydomonas reinhardtii—a single-cell green alga—and 6,000 yeast mutants.