A dishwasher-sized NASA satellite was launched from Florida on Wednesday to determine where water exists on the moon’s surface, for example, in a permanently shadowed crater on the moon’s pole.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was lifted from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral and carried NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer Orbiter, built by Lockheed Martin’s space division. Satellites are the secondary payload on rockets, mainly a lunar LAND named Athena, led by missions led by the U.S. Space Exploration Company’s intuitive machine.
The moon’s surface is often considered arid, but previous measurements have found some water, even in warmer sunlight. Scientists have long hypothesized that the form of ice may have a lot of water, located in the icy and permanent shadow spots of the moon’s poles.
For example, the bottoms of hundreds of craters at the South Pole of the Moon are permanently obscured, which may fix ice. Some water may also be locked in broken rocks and dust on the moon’s surface.
The Lunar Trailblazer weighs about 440 pounds (200 kg), and when its solar panels are fully deployed, it measures about 3.5 meters and is about 3.5 meters wide.
For future lunar exploration, including potential long-term lunar bases for astronauts, agricultural water will be crucial because it can be used not only for alcohol consumption, but also for rocket fuel in breathable oxygen and hydrogen.
Satellite to orbit the moon to draw the surface
Lunar Trailblazer plans to perform a series of flying birds and loop tracks over a period of several months to paint the surface in detail. Eventually, it will rotate around an altitude of about 100 kilometers and collect high-resolution images of the target area to determine the form, distribution and abundance of water and to better understand the lunar water cycle.
“We saw a small amount of water on a part of the lunar sunlight, which is mysterious,” said planetary scientist Bethany Ehlmann, principal investigator of the mission and director of the Keck Institute of Space Research at Caltech.
But, Elman added: “The most interesting thing for many is the amount of ice that can be present in the permanently shadowed area of the moon pole. The moon pioneers will stare inside to see how much ground is.”
These locations can serve as a resource for lunar explorers in the future.
“Understanding where rovers will drive, or astronauts walk to check scientific deposits and future resource use will benefit all future land-owned missions,” Elman said.
Two Moon Trailblazers instruments will jointly perform measurements from orbit. A lunar heat mapper or LTM will map and measure the lunar surface temperature. A high-resolution volatile and mineral mapper (HVM3) will look at the moon’s surface to understand the obvious light map of water.
“We believe that the flow of water on the moon may be driven by surface temperature. So we can better understand this relationship by measuring the presence and amount of water through the HVM3 instrument and by the surface temperature of the LTM instrument.”
Moon water is believed to come from several potential sources. One possibility is that solar winds (particles from the charged solar) may react with moon minerals to produce water. Another source of information may be a comet or a meteorite, which may have delivered water to the moon in billions of years.
The exact amount of lunar water remains uncertain, but NASA estimates it could be hundreds of millions of tons.
“In addition to human exploration, lunar water is also very exciting in science,” Warren said.
“The moon has been orbiting the Earth almost since its formation. So understanding the origin of moon water may help us understand the origin of water on Earth.”
