NASA’s Lunar Flashlight SmallSat readies for launch

When NASA’s Lunar Flashlight launches no sooner than Nov. 30, the tiny satellite will start a three-month journey, with mission navigators guiding the spacecraft far previous the moon. It should then be slowly pulled again by gravity from Earth and the sun earlier than settling into a large science-gathering orbit to hunt for floor water ice inside darkish areas on the moon that have not seen daylight in billions of years.

No bigger than a briefcase, Lunar Flashlight will use a reflectometer geared up with 4 lasers that emit near-infrared gentle in wavelengths readily absorbed by surface water ice. That is the primary time that a number of coloured lasers will likely be used to hunt out ice inside these darkish craters. Ought to the lasers hit naked rock or regolith (damaged rock and dust), the sunshine will mirror again to the spacecraft. But when the goal absorbs the sunshine, that will point out the presence of water ice. The larger the absorption, the extra ice there could also be.

“We’re bringing a literal flashlight to the moon—shining lasers into these darkish craters to search for definitive indicators of water ice overlaying the higher layer of lunar regolith,” mentioned Barbara Cohen, Lunar Flashlight principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard House Flight Heart in Greenbelt, Maryland. “I am excited to see our mission contribute to our scientific understanding of the place water ice is on the moon and the way it received to be there.”

The spacecraft’s orbit—referred to as a near-rectilinear halo orbit—will take it 43,000 miles (70,000 kilometers) from the moon at its most distant level; at its closest strategy, the satellite will graze the floor of the moon, coming inside 9 miles (15 kilometers) above the lunar South Pole.

Small satellites, or SmallSats, carry a restricted quantity of propellent, so fuel-intensive orbits aren’t attainable. A near-rectilinear halo orbit requires far much less gas than conventional orbits, and Lunar Flashlight will likely be solely the second NASA mission to make use of this sort of trajectory. The primary is NASA’s Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Know-how Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) mission, which arrived at its orbit on Nov. 13, making its closest go over the moon’s North Pole.

Lunar Flashlight will use a brand new form of “inexperienced” propellant that’s safer to move and retailer than the generally used in-space propellants comparable to hydrazine. In truth, Lunar Flashlight would be the first interplanetary spacecraft to make use of this propellant, and one of many mission’s main targets is to check this know-how for future use. The propellant was efficiently examined on a earlier NASA know-how demonstration mission in Earth orbit.

The science information collected by Lunar Flashlight will likely be in contrast with observations made by different lunar missions to assist reveal the distribution of floor water ice on the moon for potential use by future astronauts.