LITTLETON, Colorado — A university-led lunar orbiter designed to pinpoint the location of ice or liquid water trapped in rocks on the moon’s surface is nearly ready for takeoff.
The Lunar Trailblazer is slated to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than Feb. 26 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will fly as a “rideshare” along with the primary payload — the Athena lunar lander, built by Houston company Intuitive Machines.
Here within a Lockheed Martin clean room, where it underwent final grooming ahead of shipping to Cape Canaveral, Lunar Trailblazer utilized the aerospace company’s new Curio platform. Curio is a novel and scalable smallsat spacecraft architecture, designed to aid deep-space exploration and to probe scientific questions in a cost-efficient way.
Lunar Trailblazer is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and led by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. Bethany Ehlmann, professor of planetary science at Caltech, is the mission’s principal investigator.
Lockheed Martin developed and built the roughly 440-pound (200 kilograms) spacecraft, as well as integrated the craft’s science instruments. The probe is outfitted with two deployable solar arrays.
Related: Private Athena moon lander arrives in Florida ahead of SpaceX launch on Feb. 26
Water signature
Lunar Trailblazer instruments will peer into the moon‘s permanently shadowed regions to spot micro-cold traps less than a football field in size. Furthermore, the pole-to-pole probe will collect measurements at multiple times of day over sunlit regions, helping researchers decipher whether water signatures on the illuminated surface change as the lunar surface temperature changes by hundreds of degrees over the course of a lunar day.
“Lunar Trailblazer shares a good bit of heritage with the GRAIL spacecraft that explored lunar gravity,” said Bronson Collins, Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft chief engineer.
NASA’s GRAIL (“Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory”) mission launched twin spacecraft dubbed “Ebb” and “Flow” to lunar orbit in 2011. The GRAIL probes were also designed and built by Lockheed Martin.
Launch window
Lunar Trailblazer is part of NASA’s…
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