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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
With one of its solar arrays deployed, NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer sits in a clean room at Lockheed Martin Space. The large silver grate attached to the spacecraft is the radiator for HVM³, one of two instruments that the mission will use to better understand the lunar water cycle.Lockheed Martin Space There’s water on the Moon, but scientists only have a general idea of where it is and what form it is in. A trailblazing NASA mission will get some answers.
When NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer begins orbiting the Moon next year, it will help resolve an enduring mystery: Where is the Moon’s water? Scientists have seen signs suggesting it exists even where temperatures soar on the lunar surface, and there’s good reason to believe it can be found as surface ice in permanently shadowed craters, places that have not seen direct sunlight for billions of years. But, so far, there have been few definitive answers, and a full understanding of the nature of the Moon’s water cycle remains stubbornly out of reach.
This is where Lunar Trailblazer comes in. Managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and led by Caltech in Pasadena, California, the small satellite will map the Moon’s surface water in unprecedented detail to determine the water’s abundance, location, form, and how it changes over time.
“Making high-resolution measurements of the type and amount of lunar water will help us understand the lunar water cycle, and it will provide clues to other questions, like how and when did Earth get its water,” said Bethany Ehlmann, principal investigator for Lunar Trailblazer at Caltech. “But understanding the inventory of lunar water is also important if we are to establish a sustained human and robotic presence on the Moon and beyond.”
Future explorers could process lunar ice to create breathable oxygen or even fuel. And they could also conduct science. Using information from Lunar Trailblazer, future human or robotic scientific investigations could sample the ice for later study to determine where the water came from. For example, the presence of ammonia in ice samples may indicate the water came from comets; sulfur, on the other hand, could show that it was vented to the surface from the lunar interior when the Moon was young and volcanically active.
This artist’s concept depicts NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer in lunar orbit about 60 miles (100 kilometers) from the surface of the Moon. The spacecraft weighs only 440 pounds (200 kilograms) and measures 11.5 feet (3.5 meters) wide when its solar panels are fully deployed.Lockheed Martin Space “In the future, scientists could analyze the ice in the interiors of permanently shadowed craters to learn more about the origins of water on the Moon,” said Rachel Klima, Lunar Trailblazer deputy principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “Like an ice core from a glacier on Earth can reveal the ancient history of our planet’s atmospheric composition, this pristine lunar ice could provide clues as to where that water came from and how and when it got there.”
Understanding whether water molecules move freely across the surface of the Moon or are locked inside rock is also scientifically important. Water molecules could move from frosty “cold traps” to other locations throughout the lunar day. Frost heated by the Sun sublimates (turning from solid ice to a gas without going through a liquid phase), allowing the molecules to move as a gas to other cold locations, where they could form new frost as the Sun moves overhead. Knowing how water moves on the Moon could also lead to new insights into the water cycles on other airless bodies, such as asteroids
Two Instruments, One Mission
Two science instruments aboard the spacecraft will help unlock these secrets: the High-resolution Volatiles and Minerals Moon Mapper (HVM3) infrared spectrometer and the Lunar Thermal Mapper (LTM) infrared multispectral imager.
Developed by JPL, HVM3 will detect and map the spectral fingerprints, or wavelengths of reflected sunlight, of minerals and the different forms of water on the lunar surface. The spectrometer can use faint reflected light from the walls of craters to see the floor of even permanently shadowed craters.
The LTM instrument, which was built by the University of Oxford and funded by the UK Space Agency, will map the minerals and thermal properties of the same lunar landscape. Together they will create a picture of the abundance, location, and form of water while also tracking how its distribution changes over time.
“The LTM instrument precisely maps the surface temperature of the Moon while the HVM3 instrument looks for the spectral signature of water molecules,” said Neil Bowles, instrument scientist for LTM at the University of Oxford. “Both instruments will allow us to understand how surface temperature affects water, improving our knowledge of the presence and distribution of these molecules on the Moon.”
Weighing only 440 pounds (200 kilograms) and measuring 11.5 feet (3.5 meters) wide when its solar panels are fully deployed, Lunar Trailblazer will orbit the Moon about 60 miles (100 kilometers) from the surface. The mission was selected by NASA’s SIMPLEx (Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration) program in 2019 and will hitch a ride on the same launch as the Intuitive Machines-2 delivery to the Moon through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. Lunar Trailblazer passed a critical operational readiness review in early October at Caltech after completing environmental testing in August at Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, where it was assembled.
The orbiter and its science instruments are now being put through flight system software tests that simulate key aspects of launch, maneuvers, and the science mission while in orbit around the Moon. At the same time, the operations team led by IPAC at Caltech is conducting tests to simulate commanding, communication with NASA’s Deep Space Network, and navigation.
More About Lunar Trailblazer
Lunar Trailblazer is managed by JPL, and its science investigation and mission operations are led by Caltech with the mission operations center at IPAC. Managed for NASA by Caltech, JPL also provides system engineering, mission assurance, the HVM3 instrument, as well as mission design and navigation. Lockheed Martin Space provides the spacecraft, integrates the flight system, and supports operations under contract with Caltech.
SIMPLEx mission investigations are managed by the Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, as part of the Discovery Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The program conducts space science investigations in the Planetary Science Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters.
For more information about Lunar Trailblazer, visit:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/lunar-trailblazer
News Media Contacts
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
Ian J. O’Neill
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-2649
ian.j.oneill@jpl.nasa.gov
Gordon Squires
IPAC, Pasadena, Calif.
626-395-3121
squires@ipac.caltech.edu
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Last Updated Oct 29, 2024 Related Terms
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4 min read New NASA Instrument for Studying Snowpack Completes Airborne Testing
Summer heat has significant effects in the mountainous regions of the western United States. Melted…
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By NASA
The Rocky Mountains in Colorado, as seen from the International Space Station. Snowmelt from the mountainous western United States is an essential natural resource, making up as much as 75% of some states’ annual freshwater supply. Summer heat has significant effects in the mountainous regions of the western United States. Melted snow washes from snowy peaks into the rivers, reservoirs, and streams that supply millions of Americans with freshwater—as much as 75% of the annual freshwater supply for some states.
But as climate change brings winter temperatures to new highs, these summer rushes of freshwater can sometimes slow to a trickle.
“The runoff supports cities most people wouldn’t expect,” explained Chris Derksen, a glaciologist and Research Scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada. “Big cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles get water from snowmelt.”
To forecast snowmelt with greater accuracy, NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) and a team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, are developing SNOWWI, a dual-frequency synthetic aperture radar that could one day be the cornerstone of future missions dedicated to measuring snow mass on a global scale – something the science community lacks.
SNOWWI aims to fill this technology gap. In January and March 2024, the SNOWWI research team passed a key milestone, flying their prototype for the first time aboard a small, twin-engine aircraft in Grand Mesa, Colorado, and gathering useful data on the area’s winter snowfields.
“I’d say the big development is that we’ve gone from pieces of hardware in a lab to something that makes meaningful data,” explained Paul Siqueira, professor of engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and principal investigator for SNOWWI.
SNOWWI stands for Snow Water-equivalent Wide Swath Interferometer and Scatterometer. The instrument probes snowpack with two Ku-band radar signals: a high-frequency signal that interacts with individual snow grains, and a low-frequency signal that passes through the snowpack to the ground.
The high-frequency signal gives researchers a clear look at the consistency of the snowpack, while the low-frequency signal helps researchers determine its total depth.
“Having two frequencies allows us to better separate the influence of the snow microstructure from the influence of the snow depth,” said Derksen, who participated in the Grand Mesa field campaign. “One frequency is good, two frequencies are better.”
The SNOWWI team in Grand Mesa, preparing to flight test their instrument. From an altitude of 4 kilometers (2.5 miles), SNOWWI can map 100 square kilometers (about 38 square miles) in just 30 minutes.
As both of those scattered signals interact with the snowpack and bounce back towards the instrument, they lose energy. SNOWWI measures that lost energy, and researchers later correlate those losses to features within the snowpack, especially its depth, density, and mass.
From an airborne platform with an altitude of 2.5 miles (4 kilometers), SNOWWI could map 40 square miles (100 square kilometers) of snowy terrain in just 30 minutes. From space, SNOWWI’s coverage would be even greater. Siqueira is working with Capella Space to develop a space-ready SNOWWI for satellite missions.
But there’s still much work to be done before SNOWWI visits space. Siqueira plans to lead another field campaign, this time in the mountains of Idaho. Grand Mesa is relatively flat, and Siqueira wants to see how well SNOWWI can measure snowpack tucked in the folds of complex, asymmetrical terrain.
For Derksen, who spends much of his time quantifying the freshwater content of snowpack in Canada, having a reliable database of global snowpack measurements would be game-changing.
“Snowmelt is money. It has intrinsic economic value,” he said. “If you want your salmon to run in mountain streams in the spring, you must have snowmelt. But unlike other natural resources, at this time, we really can’t monitor it very well.”
For information about opportunities to collaborate with NASA on novel, Earth-observing instruments, see ESTO’s catalog of open solicitations with its Instrument Incubator Program here.
Project Leads: Dr. Paul Siqueira, University of Massachusetts (Principal Investigator); Hans-Peter Marshall, University of Idaho (Co-Investigator)
Sponsoring Organizations: NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO), Instrument Incubator Program (IIP)
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Last Updated Oct 29, 2024 Related Terms
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By NASA
2 min read
NASA Reveals Prototype Telescope for Gravitational Wave Observatory
NASA has revealed the first look at a full-scale prototype for six telescopes that will enable, in the next decade, the space-based detection of gravitational waves — ripples in space-time caused by merging black holes and other cosmic sources.
On May 20, the full-scale Engineering Development Unit Telescope for the LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) mission, still in its shipping frame, was moved within a clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. NASA/Dennis Henry The LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) mission is led by ESA (European Space Agency) in partnership with NASA to detect gravitational waves by using lasers to measure precise distances — down to picometers, or trillionths of a meter — between a trio of spacecraft distributed in a vast configuration larger than the Sun. Each side of the triangular array will measure nearly 1.6 million miles, or 2.5 million kilometers.
“Twin telescopes aboard each spacecraft will both transmit and receive infrared laser beams to track their companions, and NASA is supplying all six of them to the LISA mission,” said Ryan DeRosa, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The prototype, called the Engineering Development Unit Telescope, will guide us as we work toward building the flight hardware.”
The prototype LISA telescope undergoes post-delivery inspection in a darkened NASA Goddard clean room on May 20. The entire telescope is made from an amber-colored glass-ceramic that resists changes in shape over a wide temperature range, and the mirror’s surface is coated in gold. NASA/Dennis Henry The Engineering Development Unit Telescope, which was manufactured and assembled by L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York, arrived at Goddard in May. The primary mirror is coated in gold to better reflect the infrared lasers and to reduce heat loss from a surface exposed to cold space since the telescope will operate best when close to room temperature.
The prototype is made entirely from an amber-colored glass-ceramic called Zerodur, manufactured by Schott in Mainz, Germany. The material is widely used for telescope mirrors and other applications requiring high precision because its shape changes very little over a wide range of temperatures.
The LISA mission is slated to launch in the mid-2030s.
Download additional images from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
By Francis Reddy
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
301-286-1940
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Oct 22, 2024 Related Terms
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By NASA
7 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Jhony Zavaleta, ASIA-AQ Project Manager, welcomes DC-8 Navigator Walter Klein and the rest of the aircraft crew to U-Tapao, Thailand for its initial arrival to the country during the ASIA-AQ campaign. Erin Czech (back, blue shirt) and Jaden Ta (front, black pants) served as part of the Thailand ESPO site management team, while Zavaleta and Sam Kim (far right) worked as the ESPO advance team to prepare each new site for the mission’s arrival. NASA Ames/Rafael Luis Méndez Peña ESPO solves problems before you know you have them. If you are missing a canister of liquid nitrogen, got locked out of your rental car, or need clearance for a South Korean military base, you want ESPO in your corner.
What is ESPO?
While the Earth Science Project Office (ESPO) does many things, one of the team’s primary responsibilities is providing project management for many of the largest and most complex airborne campaigns across NASA’s Earth Science Division.
Some of these missions are domestic, such as the Sub-Mesoscale Ocean Dynamics Experiment (S-MODE). S-MODE deployed three separate field campaigns from 2021-2023, using planes, drones, marine robotics, and research vessels to study ocean eddies and sub-surface dynamics. NASA Ames Research Center, located in Northern California, served as S-MODE’s control center and the base for two of the three deployed aircraft.
Erin Czech (far left) stands with Jacob Soboroff and the Today Show crew, members of the NASA Ames Public Affairs Office, researchers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and the NASA Langley G-III air crew during S-MODE’s 2023 deployment. Courtesy of Jacob Soboroff
ESPO also provides project management for many international missions, such as the Airborne and Satellite Investigation of Asian Air Quality (ASIA-AQ), which deployed in January, 2024 out of South Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines. The campaign used satellites, aircraft, and ground-based sensors to study air quality across Asia, as part of a global effort to better understand the factors that contribute to air quality.
Despite the critical nature of ESPO’s work, they’ll be the first to tell you that their goal is to remain behind the scenes. “Our mission statement is essentially to let the scientists concentrate on science,” said Erin Czech, Assistant Branch Chief of ESPO. “Our team’s job is to stay in the background. We don’t really advertise all the things we do, the pieces we put together, the crises we solve, because we don’t want folks to have to be in the weeds with us. We’ll take care of it.”
Making the invisible, visible: What does this look like in practice?
Before a deployment:
Project management for major airborne campaigns begins long before a deployment. The team begins by helping establish a mission framework, such as getting a budget in place, settling grants and funding with partner universities and agencies, and performing site visits.
“We are not scientists,” Czech said, “it’s the job of the Principal Investigator to mission plan. Our job is to evaluate risk, set up contingency plans, and help make sure all the different groups are talking to each other. We work with world-class scientists, who are going to come up with an awesome plan; we just want to do whatever we need to in order to support them.”
We work with world-class scientists, who are going to come up with an awesome plan; we just want to do whatever we need to in order to support them.
Erin Czech
ESPO Assistant Branch Chief
As the deployment date draws closer, the team nails down logistics: deciding how and where to ship equipment, reserving hotel blocks for researchers, acquiring diplomatic clearances, running planning meetings between agencies, and so much more.
This process is particularly complicated for multi-site, international missions like ASIA-AQ, which required multiple visits to each country before the actual deployment. “We looked at many locations in each country on the first scouting trip, to help figure out deployment sites,” said Jhony Zavaleta, Deputy Director for ESPO and Project Manager for ASIA-AQ. “The second scouting trip was to evaluate modifications promised during the first trip, such as upgrades to infrastructure, and to figure out hotels, transit options, specific facilities for mission operations, that sort of thing.”
According to Zavaleta, another purpose of these advance trips was to put pieces in place with partner organizations – such as civilian aviation authorities, foreign science ministries, or military operations – so that when NASA officially requested diplomatic clearance to run the airborne campaigns, the groundwork had already been laid.
Then it’s go time.
During the deployment:
As the deployment gets underway, ESPO keeps the flurry of activity running as smoothly as possible.
“During a deployment, you’re working all day every day,” said Czech, who is also the Project Manager for S-MODE. “But really that’s the whole mission team. When you’re on a NASA project, the whole team is incredibly dedicated and working like crazy, because everybody’s on the same page to make the most out of this investment, and take advantage of any kind of science opportunity that presents itself day to day.”
For Zavaleta, day-to-day operations meant escorting personnel onto military bases, tracking down liquid nitrogen, coordinating media days with local news outlets, setting up satellite communications, arranging transportation between sites, and preparing the next location. “I was on the ESPO advance team, which would set up one location, overlap with the ESPO site management team for about a week, then head to the next,” Zavaleta recalled. “Our teams would leapfrog; we were always managing site logistics, but also always preparing and setting up for the next spot.”
(From left) Stevie Phothisane, Vidal Salazar, and Daisy Gonzalez, the ESPO site management team for the Philippines during ASIA-AQ, sit at Clark International Airport coordinating daily operations support while the aircraft was in flight.NASA Ames/Rafael Luis Méndez Peña
Beyond the day-to-day operations, ESPO also steps in when major issues arise. According to Czech, they can usually expect one or two big wrenches to come up for any major mission.
For S-MODE, the first wrench came in the form of a global pandemic. “The original deployment was set for April, 2020,” Czech said. “Everything was shutting down, and we had just set everything up: ship, aircraft, everything. In fact, we set everything up two more times before we ultimately got to do our first deployment, in October of 2021.”
The second major wrench happened when four months before the actual launch, the research vessel the mission was planned around backed out. From there, Czech said it was a mad scramble to find a suitable replacement vessel that was already on the West Coast, and to build out the on-board infrastructure to meet the mission requirements.
The R/V (Research Vessel) Oceanus sits docked in Newport, Oregon during S-MODE ship mobilization. The Oceanus was one of three research vessels that deployed throughout the mission. NASA Ames/Sommer Nicholas
“The key is just to always be on the lookout for issues, keep agile, and don’t get too frustrated if things don’t go your way,” Czech said. “It is what it is. Some major issue comes up on every big mission: you’ve just got to figure out how to deal with it, then move on.”
After the deployment:
After a field deployment is finished, there are still years of work to do – for the scientists and for ESPO.
The final S-MODE field deployment concluded in Spring of 2023. While the science team has been processing data and analyzing results, ESPO’s role has been to organize annual science team meetings, track publications tied to the mission, and help compile a final report to be presented in Washington DC when the mission officially wraps in May of 2025.
Researchers Kayli Matsuyoshi, Luke Colosi and Luc Lenain in the Air-Sea Interaction Laboratory at SIO discussing the latest S-MODE findings. Courtesy of Nick Pizzo For ASIA-AQ, whose deployment wrapped up in March of 2024, ESPO’s first task was getting all equipment and personnel back to their respective home bases. Next up, Zavaleta and his team are coordinating a science team meeting in Malaysia in January of 2025, and supporting the scientists as they put together a preliminary research report for later that spring.
Knowledge and Expertise
While logistical skills and communication brokering are important pieces of ESPO’s role, knowledge may be the group’s most important asset. “In many ways, our value to NASA lies in the fact that we’ve been doing this a long time,” Czech said. “Our first mission was in 1987, and we’ve run over 60 campaigns since then; we have a lot of institutional knowledge that gets passed down, and a lot of experience between our team members. That expertise is a large part of our value to the agency.”
To access the data from S-MODE, visit the Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC)
About the Author
Milan Loiacono
Science Communication SpecialistMilan Loiacono is a science communication specialist for the Earth Science Division at NASA Ames Research Center.
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Last Updated Oct 18, 2024 Related Terms
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