The European Space Agency's (ESA) Estrack satellite communication station will continue connecting the Earth and the Moon in 2024. INTA's Maspalomas plant will support ESA's first scientific instrument to the lunar surface and another will deploy the first lunar explorer Made in Europe. The Mission 2 lander, called Resilence, will carry a lightweight carbon fiber lunar rover developed in Europe and co-funded by Luxembourg's LuxImpulse program through an ESA contract.
At the end of 2024, the Japanese lunar exploration company Ispace will launch its Hakuto-R 2 Mission. The company will depend on ESA ground stations to maintain contact with the spacecraft. "We have completed our validation testing and are ready to provide tracking and communication support from launch to landing and throughout all surface operations," said Gerhard Billig, ESA ESOC Mission Operations Center Services Manager. in Germany.
The rover will demonstrate lunar sample collection technology as part of a project carried out by Ispace Eeurope SA for NASA. Ispace Europe was established in Luxembourg in 2017 and serves as ispace's main point of contact with ESA.
The Intuitive Machines IM-1 mission, part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, became the first private effort to soft-land on the Moon on February 22, 2024. “Supporting the IM-1 mission was a valuable experience for us,” says Adrián Segura Cabrera, ESA ground operations engineer.
Norwegian company Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT) provided the communications services that connected the spacecraft to Intuitive Machines mission control on Earth. KSAT provided support from five of its own and partner antennas, one of which was ESA's 15m antenna in Kourou, French Guiana. The Kourou station provided five sessions of support to IM-1: three shortly after launch, one during the lunar approach, and one to transmit data collected on the lunar surface.
The Kourou station was also responsible for receiving the first signals from the Chinese lunar sample return mission Chang'e-6 after its launch on May 3. These signals were used by the spacecraft's operators to determine its exact location and verify its condition following the mechanical stress of takeoff. The Chang'e-6 mission carried several European payloads, including ESA's first scientific instrument to operate on the surface of the Moon.
The Negative Ions at the Lunar Surface instrument, built for ESA by the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, successfully detected the presence of negative ions on the lunar surface for the first time. On June 25, the Chang'e-6 probe brought I get almost two kilos of samples from the far side of the Moon. ESA tracked the reentry module during its approach using the Maspalomas station, operated by Spain's National Institute of Aerospace Technology as part of the expanded Estrack network. Tracking the module shortly before it re-entered the atmosphere at high speed required high-precision antenna operations and helped the Chang'e-6 team predict where and when the sample capsule would land.
