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The spacecraft will use its near-infrared lasers to illuminate the Moon’s shaded polar regions, while an on-board reflectometer will measure reflection and surface composition. Image courtesy of NASA / JPL-Caltech
As astronauts explore the Moon during the Artemis program, they may need to make use of resources that already exist on the lunar surface. Take water, for example: Because it is a heavy resource and therefore costly to launch from Earth, our future explorers may have to search for ice to extract it. Once excavated, it can be melted and purified for drinking and used as rocket fuel. But how much water is there on the Moon and where could we find it?
This is where the NASA moon lantern comes in. Approximately the size of a briefcase, the small satellite, also known as CubeSat, aims to detect surface ice that is naturally found at the bottom of craters on the Moon that have never seen sunlight.
“Although we have a pretty good idea that there is ice inside the moon’s cooler, darker craters, the previous measurements have been a bit ambiguous,” said Barbara Cohen, mission principal investigator at the Goddard Space Flight Center in NASA in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Scientifically, that’s fine, but if we plan to send astronauts there to dig up the ice and drink it, we have to be Of course exists.”
Managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the spacecraft is a demonstration of technology: It will seek to accomplish several technological innovations, including the first mission to search for water ice with lasers. 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 commonly used spacecraft propeller hydrazine.
“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, Lunar Flashlight project manager at JPL.
Looking into the shadows
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 really shines in the crater,” said Cohen, whose team includes scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles, the John Hopkins Laboratory of Applied Physics and the University of Colorado. “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 greater the absorption, the more widespread ice can be on the surface.
While CubeSat can provide information only about the presence of ice on the surface, and not below it, the Lunar Lantern seeks to fill a critical gap in our understanding of the amount of water ice these regions possess. “We will also be able to compare the data from the Lunar Lantern with the excellent data we already have from other missions in lunar orbit to see if there are correlations in the water ice signatures, giving us a global view of the distribution of ice in the surface”. Cohen added.
The mission is detailed in a new article published in the April 2020 issue of IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine.
Lunar Flashlight is funded by the Small Spacecraft Technology program within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. The program is based at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. It 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 launch of the Space Launch System rocket ( SLS) from the recently updated Exploration Earth Systems at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
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. We will use what we learn on the Moon to prepare ourselves to send astronauts to Mars.
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