NASA’s Lunar Flashlight SmallSat Launch Date update and more

When NASA’s Lunar Flashlight launches, the tiny satellite will begin a three-month journey, with mission navigators guiding the spacecraft far past the Moon.

The Lunar Flashlight SmallSat launch date has been updated to no earlier than Dec. 11, at 2:38 a.m. EST (Saturday, Dec. 10, at 11:38 p.m. PST).

Lunar Flashlight SmallSat will search for water ice in permanently shadowed craters at the Moon’s South Pole, using an orbit only one other spacecraft has employed.

It will then be slowly pulled back by gravity from Earth and the Sun before settling into a wide science-gathering orbit to hunt for surface water ice inside dark regions on the Moon. Notably, these regions haven’t seen sunlight in billions of years.

No larger than a briefcase, Lunar Flashlight will use a reflectometer equipped with four lasers that emit near-infrared light in wavelengths readily absorbed by surface water ice.

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This is the first time that multiple colored lasers will be used to seek out ice inside these dark craters. Should the lasers hit bare rock or regolith (broken rock and dust), the light will reflect back to the spacecraft. (AFP)

But if the target absorbs the light, that would indicate the presence of water ice. The greater the absorption, the more ice there may be.

The spacecraft’s orbit – called a near-rectilinear halo orbit – will take it 43,000 miles (70,000 kilometers) from the Moon at its most distant point; at its closest approach, the satellite will graze the surface of the Moon, coming within 9 miles (15 kilometers) above the lunar South Pole.

Small satellites, or SmallSats, carry a limited amount of propellent, so fuel-intensive orbits aren’t possible. A near-rectilinear halo orbit requires far less fuel than traditional orbits, and Lunar Flashlight will be only the second NASA mission to use this type of trajectory.

The first is NASA’s Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) mission, which arrived at its orbit on Nov. 13, making its closest pass over the Moon’s North Pole.

The science data collected by Lunar Flashlight will be compared with observations made by other lunar missions to help reveal the distribution of surface water ice on the Moon for potential use by future astronauts. Lunar Flashlight will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.