LEXI - Studying the Earth's Magnetosphere from the moon

Boston University is leading the development of the Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager (LEXI) instrument, which is booked to land the Moon's surface in 2023 onboard the Blue Ghost lander, which is built and operated by Firefly Aerospace.

LEXI is a wide Field-of-View (FOV) soft X-ray imager, designed to study the interactions between the solar wind and the Earth’s magnetic field. These interactions play an important role in space weather, which can have big impacts on satellites as well as electrical systems here on Earth.

Another great thing about the LEXI project is that it has its own twitter channel with regular updates on ths instrument's developments.

LEXI under going vibration testing (Credit: Boston University)

LEXI is a collaboration between Boston University, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, University of Miami, University of Kansas, and the University of Leicester.

LEXI's 5x5 degree FOV soft X-ray telescope will be able to continually look at at the Earth's magnetosphere. From its vantage point on the Moon, it will have a good side view of the bow shock (see simulated image below). 

A simulated LEXI image (Credit: LEXI project team)

Twice a month, as the Moon orbits the Earth, there is a side view of the bow shock, and the views at other times of the month might also be useful. 

However, Since the 2023 lander mission will not have luanr night survival capability, LEXI will only get a single pass around dusk on the first lunar day during which it can image the bow shock from the side. As such, this first mission should be seen mainly as a proof of concept. 

With appropriate lunar night survival capabilities, future instances of LEXI could be deployed on the Moon to carry out ongoing observations over many months or years. Note that due to the Moon's librations and orbit, the Earth doesn't remain fixed in the sky, but it's pretty close to fixed. An actuaor system would be needed to pan and tilt to follow the Earth's motion and keep LEXI aimed at exactly the desired direction.

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Panoramic Camera for the Lunar Surface

Canadian company Canadensys Aerospace Corporation has been awarded C$2.4 million in funding to develop a 360-degree (panoramic) camera that will capture images of the Moon’s surface from onboard a lunar lander.

The funding support comes from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program (LEAP), in which C$150 million is being invested over the next five years to assist new technologies to develop and be tested out at the Moon.

The camera will be able to capture images and videos, and it will also feature image processing and compression to minimize the data link requirements for sending the imagery back to Earth. 

Canadensys Space Grade Imagers (credit: Canadensys)

Cameras are an essential element of any planentary lander mission involving a rover so the CSA funding for this camera system are no doubt linked to thier plans to send an advanced rover to the Moon in a later mission.

This type of camera system will provide Earth-based remote operators of the rover a live monitoring capability allowing them to direct the lunar surface operations. One can imagine more complex rover missions later on to prepare for human missions, such as construction of roads, landing pads and habitats. Canadian lunar mining efforts, such as that of Deltion, could also benefit grately from such capabilities.  

The Canadensys panoramic camera system will get its first lunar-surface test in 2022, flying to the Moon onboard ispace's HAKUTO-R lander (see excellent video at that link), described in the infographic below.

Hakuto-R Lander Infographic (credit ispace)

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MSolo: Sampling the Moon's Exosphere

Today, despite many lunar missions, we still don't know for sure if there is enough water on the Moon to be useful for supporting human life. The Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations (MSolo) is a scientific instrument developed by NASA that has the potential to resolve this once and for all.

NASA will use MSolo to identify molecules bouncing around near the surface of the Moon, i.e. in the Moon's "exosphere". If water molecules are present in the exosphere in sufficient quantities, scientists can reasonably infer the nearby quantities of water bound up in the Moon's regolith. 

MSolo payload units are already scheduled to fly on three of NASA's upcoming Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) robotic moon landing missions:

• In Q4 of 2021, on Astrobotic Technology's, landing at Lacus Mortis
• In late 2022, on Intuitive Machines' Mission 2 (IM-2), landing at a polar region
• In late 2023, on the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, (VIPER) mission to the Moon’s South Pole (also on an Astrobotic lander). 

MSolo Instrument (Image credit NASA)

Astrobotic Technology's Peregrine Mission One will characterize the lunar exosphere throughout the illuminated period of the first lunar day (about two weeks duration), to understand the release and movement of volatile species as a function of time. Directly after the lander touches down the local exosphere is expected to show a high signal from the lander's propulsion system exhaust. The measurements are then expected to show a decay in exosphere density from its post-landing peak. During the measurement period, other stimuli creating transient increases are also hoped to be observed, e.g. when mechanisms or other payloads of the lander are active or if any meteorites land nearby.

As Peregrine Mission One will land at a non-polar region, no substantial water signature is expected. However, the two subsequent missions will be landing near the South Pole where satellite-based evidence suggets substantially higher amounts of water are present in the regolith.

On the EM-2 mission the MSolo instrument will help evaluate subsurface soil cuttings brought up by the PRIME-1 drill that will dump the material on the surface. MSolo will sample the molecules released from the cuttings.

 

On the VIPER mission MSolo will be used in a similar way but at multiple locations near the Moon's South Pole thanks to it being mounted on a mobile rover.

MSolo is a modification of a commercial off-the-shelf mass spectrometer.  The commercial product is INFICON's Transpector MPH, a residual gas analyzer used in the semiconductor manufacturing sector here on Earth. It is a quadrupole type mass spectrometer. Like all mass spectrometers it measures the mass-to-charge ratio of ions. NASA worked with INFICON to develop a new version that is space capable. It has a new space-qualified instrument compueter, modified control electronics and a new strutural housing to resist the loads of launch and provide adequate thermal protection for hte two-week landed mission duration. A new releasable dust cover was also developed to protect the instrument from dust and debris kicked up during landing.

MSolo's weight is <7.5kg.

MSolo will not be the first mass spectrometer to operate on the lunar surface. That honour goes to an Apollo era instrument called LACE, which flew on Apollo 17 in 1972. LACE was a miniature magnetic deflection mass spectrometer deployed on the surface and oriented to intercept and measure the downward flux of molecular gases. This instrument operated for 9 months, supported to survive the lunar nights by a SNAP-27 Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG). LACE's measurements were routinely swamped by artifacts emanating from the nearby Apollo lunar module descent stage and other abandoned equipment during the lunar day. Water was not detected in its measurements due to the high backgrounds both inside and outside the instrument, and its relatively low sensitivity compared to modern day mass portable mass spectrometers like MSolo.

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Lunar Crater Radio Telescope

A group of US researchers recently received a $500,000 grant to study a new type of radio telescope that might one day be built on the Moon.

The grant was awarded as a second phase project under NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program.

The lunar telescope would involve robots hanging a large sheet of wire mesh in a crater on the Moon's far side to create a giant radio telescope that would study the formation of the first stars after the Big Bang. The telescope might also help scientists better understand dark matter.

A 1km aperture Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (Image Credit NASA)

Radio telescopes are a relatively common here on Earth but there are some major advantages of developing one on the Moon.

On the Earth's surface radio waves from the first few million years of the universe (wavelengths 10m and more) are blocked by the ionosphere. There is also a lot of interference from radio systems on our own planet. So a radio telescope located on the far side of the moon would give a unique capability to study important scientific questions.

The NIAC study aims to look at a new apparoch for building such a telescope at a lower cost. It would still be a grand science insturment, but just a bit more achieveable in the astronomy budgets expected in coming 10-15 years (my numbers).

The design they are putting forward would makes use of a lunar crater around 3 kilometers wide (the exact crater can chosen later becasue there are so many of them!). The antenna would be nesteled at the base of the crater, covering a width of about 1 kilometer. Its largest component would be a reflector dish made from thousands of individual panels.

The radio reciever would be suspended above the disk on cables running from mounting points at the sides of the crater. A similar concept, on a much smaller scale was used in the Arecibo radio telescope that recently was decommissioned due to degradation.

Due to the high costs and complexities of transporting humans to the Moon, and sustaining them there, the most cost-effective approach for making the giant lunar telescope would be to use robots. The NIAC study will examine options for autonomous robots as well as remotely operated ones. 

If the remotely operated option is chosen, this could be a great opportunity for the AROSE remote operations centre, an Australian effort to support the space sector by harnessing the country's existing capabilities in remotely operating mining equipment.

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Moon Mining Ground Truth by Intuitive Machines

The Nova-C robotic lunar lander under development by Texas-based company Intuitive Machines will carry a variety of payloads to the lunar surface in 2021 and 2022, including payloads to investigate the viabilty of lunar resource utlisation (i.e. moon mining). 

The payloads will be provided by both commercial customers and NASA. The NASA payloads will conduct scientific research and technology demonstrations under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which aims to lay the groundwork to send astronauts back to the Moon later this decade. 

The first lunar landing mission by Intuitive Machines designated IM-1 is scheduled for launch as soon as 11 October 2021 on a SpaceX Falcon 9. This lander will attempt to land in the Ocean of Storms. 

The company's second mission, IM-2 is set to launch as early as 2022, and will carry a payload called Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1 (PRIME-1). This will drill for water ice under the lunar surface in a polar area of the Moon [SpaceNews]. 

PRIME-1 Drill (Image Credit: NASA)

The measurements obtained by the drill will be a key early test of theories for the presence and formation of lunar water, in the form of ice mixed in with the regolith. If the existance of lunar water in sufficient quanities can be confirmed, it will be of great benefit to further lunar exploration efforts and could support human bases.

IM-1 Lunar Lander (Image Credit: Intuitive Machines)

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