In December 1968, the Apollo 8 mission took three astronauts on a journey around the Moon, farther than anyone had gone before. For a mission so far away, navigation was the biggest unknown factor. If the speed of the spacecraft had been a little less, it would have crashed on the far side of the Moon.
Currently, in consideration of upcoming missions Artemis from NASA to the moon, the space agency is once once more thinking regarding navigation and security. To that end, NASA is looking to test a new lunar navigation system that uses signals from Earth’s Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), but in the vicinity of the Moon. That has never been done before. NASA is preparing to send this experimental payload to the Moon, to be delivered by Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander sometime in 2024. according to NASA.
GNSS refers to constellations of satellites that transmit positioning, timing, and navigation signals from space to receivers on Earth. The most widely used GNSS system is GPS, operated by the United States Space Force.
NASA’s GNSS Lunar Receiver Experiment (LuGRE), developed in partnership with the Italian Space Agency (ASI), will attempt to compute the first position fixes during a trip to the Moon, as well as on the lunar surface. LuGRE will receive signals from both GPS and Europe’s own GNSS constellation, Galileo, during its journey to the Moon. The receiver will also perform navigation experiments at different altitudes and in orbit around the Moon.
After landing on the Moon with Blue Ghost, the LuGRE receiver will deploy its antenna and collect data for 12 days, or possibly longer. The collected data will then be transmitted to Earth and used to develop operational lunar GNSS systems for future missions to the Moon.
“In this case, we are pushing the boundaries of what GNSS was intended to do, namely expanding the scope of systems built to provide services to terrestrial, aviation and maritime users to also include the fast-growing space sector” said in a communiqué JJ Miller, deputy director for policy and strategic communications for NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program. “This will greatly improve the accuracy and resiliency of what was available during the Apollo missions and allow for more flexible equipment and operational scenarios.”
LuGRE is part of ongoing efforts to expand the high-altitude capabilities of GNSS, a system space missions have long relied on for navigation and timing. In recent years, the system’s range has expanded to include missions that are between approximately 2,896 kilometers and 35,405 km in altitude. In 2016, NASA’s Multiscale Magnetospheric Mission used GPS at a record altitude of 70,000 km above Earth.
“LuGRE is the latest effort in a long line of missions designed to expand high-altitude GNSS capabilities,” Fabio Dovis, LuGRE Co-Principal Investigator at the Italian Space Agency, said in a statement. “We have developed a state-of-the-art experiment that will serve as the foundation for operational GNSS systems on the Moon.”
