What's Happening in Space: July 2023

1^st July – close approach of Venus and Mars

Venus and Mars - they’ve slowly been creeping together in the evening sky and will reach their closest approach on 1^st July before moving apart again. Look to the west as the sun sets – Venus will appear the brighter of the two, with Mars a little higher in the sky with its reddish-tinge. Try to find a place with a clear view of the horizon without tall buildings and trees to give you the best chance of seeing the pair, as they’ll be setting throughout the evening and will disappear below the horizon before midnight.

1^st July – launch of Euclid mission

Euclid is an astrophysics mission with a telescope and two scientific instruments designed to explore the evolution of the dark universe. It is scheduled to launch at 16:11 BST – you can watch here: https://youtube.com/live/2OJ6lCFS29Y.

Euclid aims to help us understand dark energy and dark matter by accurately measuring the universe's acceleration. To achieve this, the telescope will make a 3D-map of the universe by measuring the shapes of galaxies at varying distances from Earth (out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky). It will then investigate the relationship between distance and redshift to more accurately determine the increasing rate of the acceleration of the expanding universe. Dark energy is generally accepted as a major contributor to the ‘driving force’ behind the accelerated rate of the expanding universe, so understanding this relationship will help to refine how physicists and astrophysicists understand it. Euclid's mission advances and complements ESA's Planck telescope (2009 to 2013). The mission is named after the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid. Euclid will be launched to an observing orbit at the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point. The mission was originally supposed to launch on a Russian Soyuz rocket. The Falcon 9’s first stage booster will land on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

9^th July – Venus at its brightest

Look out for Venus as the sun sets on 9^th July – when it will be at its greatest brightness in its 2023 evening apparition. An apparition of an object is a period of weeks or months during which it is visible in the night sky so this basically means it’s the brightest Venus will be in the evening sky before it starts to swing back towards the Sun and eventually appear in our morning skies again.

11^th/12^th July – close approach / conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter

On the evening of 11^th July whilst below the horizon, the crescent moon will be in conjunction (sharing the same right ascension – coordinate) with Jupiter. Instead look for the pair during the very early morning of 12^th July where they’ll appear in close approach in the east when they rise above the horizon after 1am. You should be able to spot the Moon with Jupiter to its east – they’ll be close to the horizon so do try to find a clear view of the sky without tall trees and buildings to obstruct your view. Check out the astronomical phenomena blog above to find out more about conjunctions and other astronomical phenomena.

13^th July – launch of Chandrayaan-3

With a launch window spanning 12^th-19^th July, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) have announced they’re targeting the launch of their Chandrayaan-3 mission on Thursday 13^th July, 10:00am BST. The launch is set to take place at the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, India, using a GSLV Mark 3 heavy-lift launch vehicle and the spacecraft won’t reach the Moon until around 23^rd August. The Chandrayaan Program is a long-term lunar exploration program that saw the first mission successfully deploy a lunar orbiter and impactor in 2006. In 2019, Chandrayaan-2 got its orbiter in place but failed to soft land the lander and rover component. As such Chandrayaan-3’s focus is to successfully deploy a lunar lander and rover that will operate for roughly 14 days. The Chandrayaan Program is set to continue with missions 4 and 5 between 2025-2030 with the aim of conducting on-site sampling and then mission 6 will be a lunar sample return mission between 2030-2035. We’ll have a blog about the Chandrayaan-3 mission written by Ed Turner in our Education team up on our website very soon: https://www.spacecentre.co.uk/news/space-now-blog/

21^st July – close approach / conjunction of the Moon and Mars

Just a day later during the early morning of 21^st July, the crescent moon will be in conjunction (sharing the same right ascension – coordinate) with Mars, but both will be well below the horizon making the vent impossible to catch from the UK at that time. Instead wait until around sunset on the day and look for the Moon sitting to the east and above Mars in the western sky in close approach of one another. By the time the sky begins to darken for the pair to be seen well, they’ll be very close to the horizon so try to find a clear observing location without tall buildings/trees that may usually block you view. Check out the astronomical phenomena blog above to find out more about conjunctions and other astronomical phenomena.

30^th July – peak of the Delta Aquariid meteor shower

An average shower, ~ 20 meteors per hour at its peak, produced by dust left behind by comet 96P/Machholz. The peak isn’t clearly defined but the evening of 30^th July into 31^st July is likely the best time to observe (evening through till just before dawn the following day). Full moon falls on 1^st August so moonlight interference will be an issue throughout the night until the early hours where it sets below the horizon, but it’s still worth viewing from as dark a location as possible especially if you head out after midnight on 31^st July when the constellation of Aquarius (where the radiant lies) will be higher in the south. Find an open location with clear views of the horizon and face south looking away from the radiant and scanning the entire starry canvas above as meteors can appear anywhere in the sky.

Q3 (Jul - Sep) – IM-1 mission with the Nova-C lander launches

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch the IM-1 mission with the Nova-C lander built and owned by Intuitive Machines from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The commercially built lander will carry five NASA payloads and commercial cargo and was selected through NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, in which NASA contracts with a commercial partner, in this case Intuitive Machines, that provides the launch and lander.

In April 2023, ispace (a private Japanese company) attempted to land their Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander on the Moon but failed to touchdown safely. Intuitive Machines and Astrobotic Technology Inc. (another US companies awarded a NASA CLPS contract) are both now vying to become the first private company to land a robotic spacecraft on the Moon (successfully)! Astrobotic’s previous launch date in May has now slipped (due to an anomaly that led to a violent explosion during a test of the rocket). No new launch window will be set until a review and remaining tests of the rocket and its main engines are completed, so Intuitive Machines currently seem set to get to the Moon first.

Please note: As this summary is created at the end of the month before, dates (especially launch dates) often change, or are updated, so this content may become outdated - we always recommend checking on the relevant organisation's pages.