Lunar IceCube is a NASA nanosatellite orbiter mission that was intended to prospect, locate, and estimate amount and composition of Lunar water for future exploitation.
Overview
The lunar mission was designed by Morehead State University and its partners, the
Busek, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), and The Catholic University of America (CUA).
It was selected in April 2015 by NASA's NextSTEP program (Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships) and awarded a contract worth up to US$7.9 million for further development.
The Lunar IceCube spacecraft has a 6U CubeSat format, with a mass of about . It is one of ten carried on board the maiden flight of the SLS, Artemis 1, as secondary payloads in cis-lunar space, in 2022.
History
NASA's
Lunar Prospector, Clementine, Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (
LCROSS), the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and India's Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiters and other missions, confirmed both water (H
2O) and hydroxyl (—OH
−) deposits at high latitudes on the lunar surface, indicating the presence of trace amounts of
Adsorption or bound water are present, but their instruments weren't optimized for fully or systematically characterizing the elements in the infrared wavelength bands ideal for detecting water.
These missions suggest that there might be enough ice water at polar regions to be used by future landed missions, but the distribution is difficult to reconcile with thermal maps.
Thus, the science goals were to investigate the distribution of Lunar water and other volatiles, as a function of time of day, latitude, and lunar soil composition.
Launch
The cubesat was launched on November 16, 2022
on the Space Launch System "Artemis 1" launch. The vehicle successfully communicated with the ground after deployment on Nov. 17,
[ tweet, Nov 17, 2022, NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center. Retrieved 3 August 2023.] but on Nov. 29 2022, NASA announced that the mission team was “continuing its attempts to communicate with the CubeSat so that it can be placed into its science orbit in the coming days.”
[ tweet, Nov 29, 2022, NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center. Retrieved 3 August 2023.] The site has not been updated since, and the status of the spacecraft is unknown.
Spacecraft
Instrument
Lunar IceCube carried a Broadband InfraRed Compact High Resolution Exploration Spectrometer (BIRCHES) instrument, developed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).
BIRCHES is a compact version of the volatile-seeking
spectrometer instrument onboard the
New Horizons Pluto flyby mission.
Propulsion
The tiny
CubeSat spacecraft will make use of a miniature electric
Radio frequency ion engine system based on
Busek's 3 centimeter RF ion thruster, also known as BIT-3.
It utilizes a solid
iodine propellant and an inductively-coupled plasma system that produces 1.1 mN thrust and 2800 seconds specific impulse from approximately 50
Watt total input power.
It will also use this engine for capture into lunar orbit, and orbit adjustments.
It is estimated the spacecraft will take about 3 months to reach the Moon.
Flight software
The flight software was developed in SPARK/Ada by the Vermont Technical College Cubesat Laboratory.
SPARK/Ada has the lowest error rate of any computer language, important for the reliability and success of this complicated spacecraft. It is used in commercial and military aircraft, air traffic control and high speed trains. This is the second spacecraft using SPARK/Ada, the first being the BasicLEO CubeSat
also by the Vermont Technical College CubeSat Laboratory, the only fully successful university CubeSat out of 12 on the NASA ELaNa-IV launch on U.S. Air Force Operationally Responsive Space-3 (ORS-3) mission.
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See also
-
List of missions to the Moon
- The 10 flying in the Artemis 1 mission
-
Near-Earth Asteroid Scout, from NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, was a solar sail spacecraft that was planned to encounter a near-Earth asteroid (mission failure)
-
BioSentinel, from NASA Ames Research Center, is an astrobiology mission
-
LunIR by Lockheed Martin Space
-
Lunar IceCube, from the Morehead State University
-
CubeSat for Solar Particles (CuSP)
-
Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper (LunaH-Map), designed by the Arizona State University
-
EQUULEUS, submitted by JAXA and the University of Tokyo
-
OMOTENASHI, submitted by JAXA, was a lunar lander (mission failure)
-
ArgoMoon, designed by Argotec and coordinated by Italian Space Agency (ASI)
-
Team Miles, by Fluid and Reason LLC, Tampa, Florida
- The 3 CubeSat missions removed from Artemis 1
-
Lunar Flashlight, with a mission to map exposed water ice on the Moon
-
Cislunar Explorers, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
-
Earth Escape Explorer (CU-E3), University of Colorado Boulder
