Scientists don't know if the floors inside the lunar regolith are covered by surface ice frost. NASA is sending a small satellite to find out. It will use lasers to illuminate the dark craters like a prospector looking for hidden treasure. The launch of the mission will take place in late November.
John Baker, the mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said that it would take about three months for the satellite to reach its science orbits. The moon will be searched for water ice in places that nobody else has been able to see.
It is fuel efficient.
Mission navigators will guide the craft past the moon. After it is pulled back by gravity from Earth and the Sun, it will go into a looping, science-gathering circle. The satellite will travel 42,000 miles from the Moon at its most distant point and come within 9 miles of the moon's South Pole.
SmallSats don't have a lot of propellent, so they can't do fuel- intensive orbits. Only the second NASA mission to use this type of trajectory will use a near-rectilinear halo. The CAPSTONE mission will make its closest pass over the moon's North Pole on November 13th.
According to Barbara Cohen, the principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the reason for this orbit is to be able to shine its lasers and get a good return from the surface.
As a technology demonstration, Lunar Flashlight will be the first interplanetary spacecraft to use a new kind of "green" propellant that is safer to transport and store than the commonly used in- space propellants. This new propellant was developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory and was tested on a previous NASA technology demonstration mission. That is what makes it a monopropellant. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama and Georgia Tech Research Institute in Atlanta worked together to develop and build the satellite's engine.
The first mission to use a four-laser reflectometer will be the lunar Flashlight. The reflectometer can be used to see ice on the surface. If the lasers hit bare rock, they will reflect the light back to the spaceship. If the light is absorbed, it means these dark pockets have ice. The more ice there is at the surface.
The lunar water cycle lasts for a long time.
It is thought that comets and asteroids impact the lunar surface and that solar wind interacts with the lunar regolith. The ice may have accumulated over time.
Cohen said that they are going to make the first definitive surface water ice measurements. We will be able to correlate lunar Flashlight's observations with other lunar missions to understand how extensive that water is and whether it could be used as a resource by future explorers.
Cohen's science team hopes that the data collected by the lunar flashlight can be used to understand how water cycles from location to location and where it accumulates, forming a layer of ice in the cold traps.
It's an exciting time to explore the moon. The launch of Lunar Flashlight, along with the many small satellite missions aboard Artemis I, may form the foundations for science discoveries as well as support future missions to the Moon's surface, according to Roger Hunter, Small Spacecraft Technology program manager at NASA's Ames Research Center in California'
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