For visitors to any unknown destination, knowing where you are and being able to communicate are critical capabilities. That goes double for future astronauts preparing to explore the Moon.
As the world prepares for the return of crewed missions to the Moon, including the Artemis III mission set for 2027, space agencies are teaming up with the commercial sector to help future human and robotic lunar residents overcome those issues, providing the location and comms capabilities they need.
Some hardware to further these goals is already en route to the Moon. On Jan. 15, a SpaceX Falcon 9 sent two spacecraft—ispace’s RESILIENCE and Firefly’s Blue Ghost—on a trajectory to the lunar surface with payloads on board to test new tech in these sectors. And more is on the way soon—in February, Intuitive Machines is expected to launch its second flight to the Moon. These missions will pave the way for new tech to help future astronauts navigate and communicate on the lunar surface.
Where are we? Blue Ghost, which is scheduled to attempt a Moon landing on March 2, carries 10 scientific payloads, including multiple imagers and hardware to study regolith dust accumulation and mitigation. Also on board is the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) from NASA, the Italian Space Agency, and Qascom, which will demonstrate the first Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signal receiver on and around the Moon using existing sats orbiting Earth.
“GPS makes our lives safer and more viable here on Earth,” Kevin Coggins, NASA’s SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) program manager, said in a statement. “As we seek to extend humanity beyond our home planet, LuGRE should confirm that this extraordinary technology can do the same for us on the Moon.”
There’s already evidence that GPS and GNSS signals can reach a great distance. In 2019, NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, which sought to study the Earth’s and Sun’s magnetospheres, set the record for the farthest GPS signal acquisition at over 100,000 miles away. LuGRE would more than double that distance.
If successful, the data collected by LuGRE will open the door for future tech to enable more reliable navigational capabilities on the lunar surface—and potentially lead to a dedicated lunar GPS/GNSS system.
Ring a Bell? If the first step in building a lunar outpost is to find out where you are, the next is to phone home. A Nokia payload that will attempt to set up the first 4G/LTE cellular network on the lunar surface is hitching a ride on board Athena, Intuitive Machines’ second lunar lander.
Nokia’s Lunar Surface Communication System (LSCS) functions essentially the same as the ones we use on Earth, but with some notable changes required for reliable lunar ops.
- Miniaturization: While terrestrial cellular networks require capacity for millions of connections, the network on the Moon is built to connect to the two rovers joining the mission—Intuitive Machine’s Micro-Nova Hopper and Lunar Outpost’s Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP). As a result, Nokia has made size, weight and power adjustments, reducing the structure to the size of a pizza box.
- Hardening: Bringing connectivity to the Moon required Nokia to build a system that can withstand the vibration and acceleration of launch, and the increased radiation and extreme temperatures of the lunar surface.
- Autonomy: Without any network technicians available on the moon, Nokia has made the entire system as autonomous as possible. LSCS is self-deploying, self-configuring, self-healing, and self-optimizing. It also carries redundant software, which can boot up if the initial system is corrupted.
As the rovers explore the Moon, LSCS will maintain a wireless link that provides two-way functionality—relaying command and control functions from Earth to the rovers, and sending back scientific data, video, and images. While the LSCS is purpose built for the duration of the mission—one lunar day—Nokia envisions future iterations that provide more permanent connectivity.
“If you go to a different country, you don’t bring your network. You bring your phone, you get a SIM card and you connect to a network that’s deployed. When we think 10-15 years out, that’s kind of the vision we have,” president of Nokia Bell Labs Solutions Research, Thierry Klein, told Payload.
What’s next: The lessons learned from these demonstrations will inform how navigation and comms tech is developed and built to support more permanent lunar settlements and commercial opportunities.
“Companies that need comms place requirements on us. Anybody that is resource mining, or drilling, or processing needs communication infrastructure, so they have requirements for us. We can then dimension the network, saying: how many of these nodes do we need to deploy,” Klein said.
