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Washington: The US space agency USA It plans to send a small, briefcase-sized satellite, also known as CubeSat, which will use lasers for the first time to detect surface ice believed to be at the bottom of the craters. Moon that has never seen sunlight.
Called the Lunar Lantern, it will also be the first planetary spacecraft to use a “green” propellant, a new type of fuel that is safer to transport and store than the propellant hydrazine in the commonly used spacecraft, NASA said Monday.
“A technology demonstration mission like the Lunar Flashlight, which is lower in cost and fills a specific gap in our knowledge, can help us better prepare for a widespread NASA presence on the Moon, as well as test key technologies that can be used in future missions. ” said John Baker, manager of the Lunar Lantern project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California.
Over the course of two months, the Lunar Lantern will swoop down on the Moon’s South Pole to shine its lasers on permanently shaded regions and search for ice on the surface.
Found near the north and south poles, these dark craters are believed to be “cold traps” that accumulate molecules from different ices, including water ice.
The molecules may have come from comets and asteroid material that impact the lunar surface and from the interactions of the solar wind with the lunar soil.
“The Sun moves around the horizon of the crater, but it never actually shines in the crater,” said Barbara Cohen, the mission’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
“Because these craters are so cold, these molecules never receive enough energy to escape, so they get trapped and accumulate over billions of years.”
The Lunar Lantern’s four laser reflectometer will use near-infrared wavelengths that are easily absorbed by water to identify any accumulation of ice on the surface.
If the lasers hit the bare rock as they glow in the permanently shaded regions of the South Pole, their light will reflect off the spacecraft, indicating a lack of ice.
But if light is absorbed, it would mean that these dark pockets contain ice. The higher the absorption, the more widespread ice may be on the surface, NASA said.
The mission is detailed in a new article published in the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems magazine.
Lunar Flashlight will be one of 13 secondary payloads aboard the Artemis I mission, the first integrated flight test of NASA’s Deep Space Exploration Systems, including the Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System rocket ( SLS).
Under the Artemis program, astronauts and robots will explore more of the Moon than ever.
Robotic missions begin with commercial lunar deliveries in 2021, humans return in 2024, and the agency will set up sustainable lunar exploration by the end of the decade.
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