With Artemis, NASA will establish a long-term presence on the Moon, opening the lunar surface to exploration more than ever before. This growth will require new, more robust communication, navigation and networking capabilities. NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program developed the LunaNet architecture to meet these needs.
The new era of space travel and scientific discovery ushered in by the successful launch and return of Artemis I will be astounding, but before any great discoveries can be made, astronauts will have to deal with a very earthly problem: figuring out where to go. find exactly.
Currently, astronauts and space agencies have no “easy” way to navigate to the moon. Once in orbit, the spacecraft can spend long minutes without communication with ground agencies. It’s a cumbersome and expensive system, but fortunately the international space community is hard at work to improve things.
To read: Orion: here is the new rocket intended to go to the Moon, Mars and beyond
GPS and high-speed internet will soon be available around the Moon
The solution could lie in technologies that we already have on Earth: GPS, and high-speed Internet. The cheapest way to bring satellite navigation into deep space is to harness satellites that are already orbiting the Earth, said Elizabeth Rooney, principal engineer for Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. The company is working with ESA to develop satellite navigation in space.
This could be a great solution, but there is a catch: these satellites point to the earth. Given this constraint, it might seem impossible to use this signal to navigate to the Moon. But engineers have spent decades developing sensitive detectors who could harness this signal from deep space and they succeeded. In 2019, four satellites were able to determine their position in space using signals from Earth’s GPS satellites.
The efforts of the European Space Agency and NASA do not stop there. The agencies plan to test even more sensitive sensors on future lunar missions. They specify that they will need of a fleet of satellites around the Moon: the project is called LunaNet, a proposed data network aimed at providing a “lunar internet” for spacecraft and facilities in cislunar space, as well as navigation services. You can find all the information on the LunaNet project at this address.
