On March 2, the Blue Ghost of Firefly Aerospace wrote history and became the first commercial lunar lander to successfully have touchdown on the surface of the moon. The groundbreaking lander does not waste time to go to work. According to NASAThe joint public-private mission has already successfully demonstrated to use GPS signals on the moon surface on earth, which occurs a major step on future Artemis missions.
Accurate and reliable navigation will be vital for future astronauts while they travel through the moon, but traditional GPS tools are not much good if you are about 225,000 miles from the earth. A solution may be that data from the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) to the moon surface is sent to measure time, speed and position autonomously. That is what Mission Senioreurs from NASA and the Italian space agency hoped to demonstrate via the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (Lugre), one of the 10 projects that have been packed on board Blue Ghost.
However, Lugre’s performance did not only start after the touchdown on the moon. On January 21, the instrument broke the NASA record for GNSS Signal Acquisition at the highest height at 209,900 miles from the earth while he traveled to the moon. That record continued to rise during the journey of Blue Ghost over the following days, with a peak at 243,000 miles from the earth after reaching the Lunar Orbit on 20 February.
NASA currently follows spacecraft using a mix of built-in sensors and tracking signals based on earth, but these methods generally require the general supervision of a team of engineers. Some of these systems for GNSS data can reduce the need for human operators, because the signals can be picked up autonomously by spacecraft.
“On Earth we can use GNSS signals to navigate in everything, from smartphones to aircraft,” Kevin Coggins, Deputy -Associated Manager for NASA’s Scan (Room Communication and Navigation) Program, said in a statement. “Now Lugre shows us that we can successfully acquire and follow GNSS signals at the moon.”
Lugre trusted two GNSS star images, GPS and Galileo, which the positioning of the triangle based on dozens of medium-sized lane satellites that offer real-time tracking data. It carried out its navigation mix at about 2 hours of est on March 3, while about 225,000 miles from the earth. The Lugre system from Blue Ghost will continue to collect information almost continuously in the coming two weeks, while the other tools of the lander start their own experiments.