Last week we saw an American company pull off a big American win by landing the first-ever successful commercial landing on the moon:
As exciting as Blue Ghost lunar landing was, the entire endeavor has also made history in another way:
NASA and the Italian Space Agency made history on March 3 when the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) became the first technology demonstration to acquire and track Earth-based navigation signals on the Moon's surface.
The LuGRE payload's success in lunar orbit and on the surface indicates that signals from the GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) can be received and tracked at the Moon. These results mean NASA's Artemis missions, or other exploration missions, could benefit from these signals to accurately and autonomously determine their position, velocity, and time. This represents a steppingstone to advanced navigation systems and services for the Moon and Mars.
Blue Ghost brought the LuGRE payload to the Moon when it landed last week. Shortly afterwards, NASA began its experiments with the receiver — and quickly realized success:
With the receiver data flowing in, anticipation mounted. Could a Moon-based mission acquire and track signals from two GNSS constellations, GPS and Galileo, and use those signals for navigation on the lunar surface?
Then, at 2 a.m. EST on March 3, it was official: LuGRE acquired and tracked signals on the lunar surface for the first time ever and achieved a navigation fix — approximately 225,000 miles away from Earth.
Getting those sweet sweet Earth-to-Moon signals like:
The project "will operate for 14 days providing NASA and the Italian Space Agency the opportunity to collect data in a near-continuous mode, leading to additional GNSS milestones."
The project "also broke GNSS records on its journey to the Moon" after it became "the highest altitude GNNS signal acquisition ever recorded at 209,900 miles from Earth."
And as NASA notes, the data has applications for spaceflights to Mars, which is good, because as we know things there are shaping up to be habitable in the not-too-distant future:
Glad to know it's gonna be easier to drive on Mars with our GPS apps!
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