By Nethra Sailesh
NASA has made another huge achievement when its Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) made in collaboration with the Italian Space Agency was able to receive and track Earth-based navigation signals on the Moon’s surface.
The Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) is a group or constellation of satellites that are essentially used for broadcasting timing and orbital information. Some of the satellites under this group include Global Positioning System aka the GPS (made by the USA), the Global navigation Satellite System or GLONASS (made by Russia), BeiDou Navigation Satellite System or BDS (made in China) and Galileo ( built by the European Union). India also has its regional navigation satellite system called the IRNSS.
Why is NASA’s achievement huge? As aforementioned, navigation systems like GNSS help provide exact position, navigation, and timing details.
So, with this system operating on the lunar surface as well, it’ll facilitate future lunar and Mars missions by providing independent and accurate signals of position, velocity, and time.
Traditionally, NASA would use Earth-based tracking systems, aka sensors and signals, for locating spacecrafts. As reported by WION, this new achievement means that any space mission won’t have to rely solely on radio signals from mission control to determine their exact location. They’ll be able to see their real-time location just like we used gps systems here on earth. In simple words, it reduces the constant reliance on human operators.
How did this come about? On March 2, BlueGhost, a private American company, became the second-ever private enterprise to conduct a successful lunar touchdown. It carried 10 of NASA’s payloads, one of them being LuGRE.
LuGRE’s mission was simple, to try and see if it could obtain signals from GPS and Galielo which could then be used for tacking further lunar missions. According to NASA’s official website, this also marks another milestone for Italy as LuGRE is the first Italian Space Agency developed hardware to land on the moon.
LuGRE is a collaborative mission not only between NASA and the Italian Space agency but also with industry partners Qascom, and Politecnico di Torino. BlueGhost will continue its lunar mission for two more weeks thus giving LuGRE more time to conduct GNSS research.