A new partnership between Astrolab and Interstellar Mapping is one giant leap for mapkind.
Interstellar Mapping will support Astrolab’s mission to hunt for water on the lunar surface later this year as part of NASA’s mission to build the Moon Base, the companies exclusively told Payload. It’s Interstellar Mapping’s first time working on a US commercial rover mission.
Hide and seek: Under the partnership, Interstellar Mapping will study what’s lying underneath the lunar surface, specifically looking for “hydrogen-bearing volatiles,” aka the water and ice that will be crucial to the Moon serving as a strategic gas station for missions to Mars and beyond.
Interstellar Mapping’s findings will inform where Astrolab’s FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform (FLIP) rover takes measurements on the surface, increasing the chance that the rover finds water.
“Finding lunar water isn’t simply a matter of going to the coldest or darkest places,” Interstellar Mapping CEO Andrew Hazelton said in a statement. “Understanding what is happening thermally beneath the surface helps us identify where water and other volatiles are most likely to persist.”
All aboard: FLIP is set to launch in November aboard Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 lander, which will attempt to land on the lunar south pole under a NASA CLPS contract. The rover will carry NASA payloads including:
- A camera to search for helium-3 in the lunar regolith;
- A laser-guided precision tracking system;
- A sensor to study how lunar dust affects hardware;
- A LiDAR system to create 3D surface maps of the Moon.
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With summer winding down, the environmental heat is turning back to regulations.
The FCC will vote Sept. 30 on whether to overhaul its National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) rules—narrowing which commission activities face environmental review, and streamlining the process for the ones that require assessment.
The draft order would find that space-based operations are not “major federal actions,” which is the legal trigger for NEPA review. Satellite licensing has been categorically excluded from FCC environmental review since 1986, but the new rule goes a step further by solidifying those operations as outside NEPA’s reach entirely, rather than just excusing applicants from paperwork within it.
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