by On Monday (Jan. 8), the first private American lunar spacecraft, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander, successfully launched from Florida on the first mission of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket.
Peregrine is scheduled to reach the lunar surface on February 23, although it is unclear if that will happen: the lander suffered an anomaly shortly after being deployed from Vulcan Centaur, and the mission team is working to fix it. If it makes it to the moon, Peregrine will collect vital information about the lunar surface using a suite of five NASA scientific instruments.
This data could be crucial in informing future crewed missions to the moon, including Artemis 3, which not only aims to return humans to the lunar surface for the first time in 50 years in 2025, but will also take a giant step toward diversity. by sending the first woman and first person of color to reach the moon.
Read on for a summary of the NASA science team aboard Peregrine on this pioneering mission. (There are also a variety of private payloads on the lander, including memorial capsules containing human remains.)
Related: Vulcan rocket launches private lunar lander in US, human remains debut
Peregrine will ponder this: Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA)
The Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA) developed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland is designed to facilitate measurements between spacecraft orbiting the moon and landing on the lunar surface.
To do this, the instrument is equipped with eight retroreflectors in the form of cubic glass prisms 1.25 centimeters wide that can reflect light backwards or 180 degrees. These units are enclosed in a gold aluminum sphere mounted on the platform of the Peregrine lander.
The LRA’s design means it can bounce a laser beam from a spacecraft in a wide range of directions and then send it back to its point of origin. This allows researchers to perform “laser ranging” to measure distances to Peregrine with a high degree of precision.
Because the LRA is a passive optical instrument, it will act as a location marker on the Moon for decades to come, forming the basis of a vital signal that future astronauts will use to determine precise locations.
Hunting for hydrogen: the neutron spectrometer system (NSS)
The goal of the Neutron Spectrometer System (NSS) is to determine the composition of lunar soil, known as regolith, which is composed of dust and broken rocks, in the process of searching for hydrogen-containing material.
The NSS instrument, developed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, searches for hydrogen by counting the number of neutrons present on the lunar surface and measuring the energy carried by these particles.
This is possible because when neutrons, which are present thanks to high-energy cosmic rays that hit the Moon, collide with a hydrogen atom, they lose a large amount of energy and, therefore, this is an indicator that can be used to infer the amount of hydrogen that is present in the lunar environment.
The NSS is capable of measuring the total volume of hydrogen up to 0.9 meters (3 feet) below the moon’s surface.
Assessing Radiation Risks to Astronauts with the Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer (LETS)
It may not look like much more than a simple circuit board, but the linear energy transfer spectrometer (LETS) could be a vital tool to protect the health and well-being of future space travelers.
The lunar environment presents the risk of astronauts receiving higher radiation doses than those experienced in Earth orbits, such as aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
The two predominant sources of radiation exposure on the Moon are galactic cosmic rays, charged particles such as protons, neutrons, and electrons that are twice as common on the lunar surface as in low Earth orbit, and space weather generated by the Moon. activity in the sun. .
Developed by NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and related to the instruments that flew into space on the first test flight of the agency’s Orion capsule in 2014, LETS is a 4.7-inch-long circuit board ( 12 cm) with a solid state silicon plate. Timepix detector that will measure the rate of incident radiation.
As such, it will determine the amount of radiation exposure that Artemis 3 astronauts and other future lunar explorers will experience while traversing the lunar surface.
“Combining doses and LETS also allows us to translate the data into more biologically equivalent values that we can use for crew radiation protection during future lunar operations,” said Nic Stoffle, LETS science and operations lead at NASA, in a teleconference on January 4. “And hopefully, we will also be able to measure a solar particle event during the mission, which will give us an idea of how such an event will affect the local radiation environment on the surface before the crews arrive.”
Related: Space weather: What is it and how is it predicted?
Monitoring Lunar Composition and Temperature: Near-Infrared Volatile Spectrometer System (NIRVSS)
Developed by NASA, the Near Infrared Volatile Spectrometer System (NIRVSS) has a wide range of applications. Chief among them is the detection of water both on and below the lunar surface.
In addition to detecting water, which could be a vital resource for future space missions, providing hydration to astronauts and even hydrogen that could be used as a fuel source, the NIRVSS can measure other molecules such as methane and carbon dioxide from the surface and the subsoil.
The instrument will also map the moon’s surface and measure temperature by capturing light reflected from the lunar surface at a variety of wavelengths. NIRVSS is contained within Peregrine’s Ames Imaging Module, a camera that captures images to add context to the spectrometer data. This will allow operators to see if an image contains water or other compounds.
Understanding Volatile Release on the Moon: Pilgrim Ion Trap Mass Spectrometer (PITMS)
Developed by NASA Goddard, the UK’s Open University and STFC RAL Space, the Pilgrim Ion Trap Mass Spectrometer (PITMS) will measure the release of volatiles on the Moon during the lunar day, tracking how they move over the Moon.
This will answer lingering questions about where volatiles (elements and molecules like water that can vaporize relatively easily) come from. PITMS will also help scientists determine which transport mechanism is responsible for the movement of the volatiles.
PITMS is inspired by the spectrometer carried by the European Rosetta mission, which carried out a similar investigation of volatiles on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.
Operating in passive mode, waiting for molecules to fall into it, PITMS will provide time-resolved variability of water, noble gases, nitrogen and sodium compounds released from the lunar soil and present in the moon’s tenuous outer atmosphere over the course of a lunar day.
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The data provided by PITMS will be combined with observations from other Peregrine instruments to allow scientists to paint a more complete picture of the lunar soil, the moon’s atmosphere, and the moon’s environment in general.
“We are very excited to fly PITMS aboard Peregrine Mission 1, because it is very complementary to NSS and NIRVSS and tries to understand the processes involved with the delivery and movement of volatiles on the lunar surface,” said PITMS deputy principal investigator , Daniel Cremons. .
