Tiny Cubesat Will Shine an Infrared 'Flashlight' Into the Moon's Shadowed Craters, Searching for Water Ice - By Nancy_A. Fingers crossed for launch overnight!
“If we are going to have humans on the Moon,” said Barbara Cohen, Lunar Flashlight principal investigator, “they will need water for drinking, breathing, and rocket fuel. But it’s much cheaper to live off the land than to bring all that water with you.”
Cohen told Universe Today that Lunar Flashlight will be looking for “operationally useful” quantities of ice, meaning enough water ice within the craters or embedded in the regolith that could be easily extracted by future rovers or lunar explorers. “Infrared wavelengths are absorbed by water,” Cohen explained, “so if water ice there, we’ll get fewer photons back than we what we sent.”
“Having a 14-kilogram spacecraft means you have to shrink a lot of things down,” Cohen said. “But it also means you must get innovative about what you’re including and what you’re not. That means we could only have one instrument, as we didn’t have room for more. But it’s a great instrument and it’s the first time that active laser spectroscopy will be done at the Moon.”
Even a full size satellite with a lot of fuel would have a hard time maintaining a that low of an orbit, so Lunar Flashlight will use an innovative orbit called a near rectilinear halo orbit. This is the same orbit currently being used by the microwave-oven-sized CAPSTONE , which is conduct tests to make sure this unique lunar orbit is actually stable. The same orbit has been proposed for the NASA’s future Lunar Gateway.
“We have an eight-month primary mission, but it depends on fuel,” Cohen said. Roughly 50 minutes after launch, Lunar Flashlight will eject from the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket. “When we are ejected, the spacecraft will tumble and we need to use fuel to get into the right orbit. With such a small fuel tank, we don’t have a huge amount of margin.”
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