Context:
Recently, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer orbiter from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to detect water on the moon.
More on the News:
- Lunar Trailblazer was a 2019 selection of NASA’s SIMPLEx (Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration), which provides opportunities for low-cost science spacecraft to ride-share with selected primary missions.
- The mission is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and its science investigation is led by Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA.
NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer orbiter
It is a dishwasher-sized NASA satellite built by Lockheed Martin’s space division.
It weighs only 440 pounds (200 kilograms) and measures 11.5 feet (3.5 meters) wide with its solar panels fully deployed.
It will produce high-resolution maps of water on the lunar surface to decipher where the water is, what form it is in, how much is there, and how it changes over time.
It will orbit at an altitude of roughly 100 km and collect high-resolution images of targeted areas.
Two Lunar Trailblazer instruments will take measurements from orbit together.
- The Lunar Thermal Mapper (LTM): It is a JPL-developed imaging spectrometer that will map and measure the lunar surface temperature.
- The High-Resolution Volatiles and Minerals Moon Mapper (HVM3): It was developed by the University of Oxford in the U.K. and will look at the moon’s surface for a telltale pattern of light given off by water.
Much like Chandrayaan-1, Trailblazer has an infrared spectrometer (LTM) to detect water (H2O) and hydroxyl (OH) molecules based on how the Moon’s surface reflects and absorbs infrared light.
Significance of the mission:
- Trailblazer’s detection of water concentrations in ancient and young volcanic areas will help scientists understand how much water the Moon originally had and lost over time, a debated topic.
- These water levels are key to understanding the Moon’s evolution, its origin, and the origins of Earth.