There’s plans afoot to put a new telescope near the Moon’s south pole—and a Canadian company was selected this week to design and build its instrument suite.
Toronto’s Canadensys Aerospace will provide the suite to Hawaii’s International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA), for an undisclosed amount. The telescope is launching in 2027 with the aim of withstanding the harsh lunar environment, including radiation and extreme temps, for at least a year.
On the Moon map: The Moon’s south pole is about to be hopping, with nations all angling to find and exploit the water ice that’s frozen there, and NASA picking the area as its landing spot for Artemis missions in just a few years.
But there’s more to the south pole than popularity: It’s far from Earth’s signal interference. The ILO-1 telescope can image such things as the center of the Milky Way—without a passing SpaceX Starlink getting in the way, or light pollution mucking up the scene.
Sideways astronomy: Canadensys was also behind the test ILO-X observatory for ILOA. The Intuitive Machines mission carrying ILO-X in February 2024 didn’t quite go to plan: IM’s Nova-C lander, called Odysseus, landed on its side.
Nevertheless, ILO-X sent 341 images across a six-day mission at the Moon’s southern highlands. That success led to the association’s decision to work with Canadensys again, ILOA Director Steve Durst said in a statement.
ILOA must have been happy to see its hardware on the Moon, no matter what: Its first attempt for a lunar telescope mission, under a Moon Express landing agreement announced in 2013, never came to fruition.
Making tracks: Canadensys also plans to do mobile Moon science. The organization received C$43M ($31.2M from the Canadian Space Agency in 2022 to design and build a rover, which will launch around 2029 to search for water ice, and figure out lunar geology.
Canadensys is also in the running for a C$1.2B ($869.8M) “lunar utility rover”, which CSA plans to launch in about 2033 to assist astronauts on the surface. Two other companies—the Toronto-area MDA Space, and Ottawa’s Mission Control—are also working on CSA option studies for a final selection in late 2026 or early 2027.
