Water ice is known to exist beneath lunar regolith (broken rock and dust), but scientists don’t yet know if surface hoar covers the floors inside these cold craters. To find out, NASA is sending Lunar Flashlight, a small satellite (or SmallSat) no bigger than a briefcase. Flying over the lunar South Pole, it will use lasers to illuminate these dark craters, much like a prospector looking for hidden treasure by shining a flashlight into a cave. The mission will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in mid-November.
“This launch will place the satellite on a trajectory that will take approximately three months to reach scientific orbit,” said John Baker, mission project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “So Lunar Flashlight will try to find water ice on the Moon’s surface in places no one else has been able to look.”
Fuel-efficient orbits
After launch, mission navigators will guide the spacecraft past the Moon. It will then be slowly pulled by gravity from Earth and the Sun before settling into a wide looping orbit collecting scientific data. This near-rectilinear halo orbit will take it 42,000 miles (70,000 kilometers) from the Moon at its furthest point, and at its closest approach the satellite will skim the Moon’s surface, less than 9 miles away ( 15 kilometers) above the lunar south pole.
SmallSats carry a limited amount of propellant, so fuel-intensive orbits are not possible. A near-straight halo orbit requires far less fuel than traditional orbits, and Lunar Flashlight will be just NASA’s second mission to use this type of trajectory. The first is NASA’s CAPSTONE (Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment) mission, which will arrive in orbit on November 13, making its closest pass over the Moon’s North Pole.
“The reason for this orbit is to be able to get close enough for Lunar Flashlight to shine its lasers and get good return from the surface, but also to have a stable orbit that consumes little fuel,” said Barbara Cohen. , Lunar Flashlight. principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
As a technology demonstration, Lunar Flashlight will be the first interplanetary spacecraft to use a new type of “green” propellant that is safer to transport and store than propellants commonly used in space such as hydrazine. This new propellant, developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory and tested on a previous NASA technology demonstration mission, burns via a catalyst, rather than requiring a separate oxidizer. That’s why it’s called a monopropellant. The satellite’s propulsion system was developed and built by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, with integration support from the Georgia Tech Research Institute in Atlanta.
Lunar Flashlight will also be the first mission to use a four-laser reflectometer to search for water ice on the Moon. The reflectometer works by using near-infrared wavelengths that are easily absorbed by water to identify ice on the surface. If the lasers hit bare rock, their light will reflect off the spacecraft, signaling a lack of ice. But if the light is absorbed, it would mean that these dark pockets do indeed contain ice. The greater the absorption, the more ice there can be on the surface.
Lunar water cycle
The water molecules are thought to originate from materials from comets and asteroids impacting the lunar surface, and from interactions of the solar wind with the lunar regolith. Over time, the molecules may have accumulated as a layer of ice inside “cold traps”.
“We will for the first time make definitive measurements of surface water ice in permanently shaded regions,” Cohen said. “We will be able to correlate Lunar Flashlight observations with other lunar missions to understand the extent of this water and whether it could be used as a resource by future explorers.”
Cohen and his science team hope the data collected by Lunar Flashlight can be used to understand how volatile molecules, like water, move from place to place and where they can accumulate, forming a layer of ice. in these cold traps.
“This is an exciting time for lunar exploration. The launch of Lunar Flashlight, along with the many small satellite missions aboard Artemis I, could lay the groundwork for scientific discoveries and support future missions to the surface of the Earth. Moon,” said Roger Hunter, Small Spacecraft Technology Program Manager at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.
NASA’s Moon Observation CubeSat Ready for Artemis Launch
Provided by Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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