Thai lunar weather instrument set to join China’s Chang’e 7 mission to the moon

Another detector, pointing upwards, will study low-energy cosmic rays in energy ranges that have never been continuously monitored before.

01:42

China’s Chang’e 5 lunar lander finds water on the moon, but not as much as they hoped

China’s Chang’e 5 lunar lander finds water on the moon, but not as much as they hoped

A couple of months later, he said the team was excited – and a little surprised – to learn that their proposal came second in the preliminary selection conducted by the China National Space Administration (CNSA).

Now, Peerapong and his coworkers from NARIT, Chiang Mai University and Mahidol University in Bangkok are working with Chinese partners from the National Space Science Centre in Beijing, among others, to fine-tune the detailed design and key technologies of the instrument.

The plan is to have a flight model built by the end of next year, so it can be shipped to China to be assembled and tested in time for the launch, said Peerapong, who spent six years in Beijing to earn his PhD in space engineering.

Last November, the CNSA put a call out for international payloads to ride with the mission to the moon’s south pole, including up to 15kg of instruments on the orbiter and 10kg on the lander.

By April, 18 proposals from 11 countries had been received, according to the state-owned Science and Technology Daily.

Moon race: a visual explainer of lunar missions since the Cold War

On a list seen by the Post, seven of those proposals have passed the preliminary selection and are now in the engineering design phase.

These include a hyperspectral imager for water ice and lunar surface materials, a detector for lunar dust and electric fields, a moon-based telescope and a device for analysing negative ions on the moon. The proposals came from research institutions and NGOs in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North America.

Founded in 2004, NARIT is the largest space research organisation in Thailand and operates the Thai National Radio Telescope in Chiang Mai, which can be used to monitor spacecraft trajectories during the implementation of ILRS missions.

Thailand joined the China-led ILRS project last month, with a NARIT delegation and CNSA’s Deep Space Exploration Laboratory signing a memorandum of understanding on Chang’e 7 and ILRS-related cooperation in Beijing on September 25.