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3D mapping the moon

The lunar festivities kicked off in late February with the launch of a , the successor to Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus. Athena is scheduled to land near the moon’s South Pole March 6 where it will deploy a rover that’s less than 2 feet long.

Aboard the rolling robot will be a camera based on technology from an old Xbox Kinect gaming system.

That camera, , will generate the first up-close, 3D map of this part of the moon’s surface—capturing even small nooks and crannies in incredible detail. Hayne and Patrick O’Brien, a postdoctoral researcher at LASP, are spearheading an effort to use those maps to recreate information about temperatures across the moon’s surface. The Moon3D mission is led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Colorado-based company Lunar Outpost is building the lander.

“’Micro-cold traps,’ craters as small as a penny that never see the sun, could harbor abundant ice deposits that provide crucial insights into the history of water on the moon,” O’Brien said.

Athena launched Feb. 26 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Protecting astronauts from electric charges

After ROLSES, Burns’ next moon experiment is positively electric. The , in partnership with the Japanese company iSpace, will head to the moon’s Schrödinger Basin next year—a nearly 200-mile-wide impact crater on the lunar far side, or the part of the moon that never faces Earth.

From there, the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Lite (LuSEE-Lite) instrument will map out the electric charges that hover just above the moon’s surface—similar to the forces that make your socks stick together in the dryer. Those charges could pose risks to future astronauts on the moon. LuSEE-Lite consists of a single antenna that will stick up more than 20 feet from the lander.

Burns serves as a co-investigator on the mission, which is led by the University of California, Berkeley.��

Tuning in to the ancient universe

A similar instrument known as LuSEE-Night will build on data from LuSEE-Lite, with a dark twist. It’s flying aboard Blue Ghost 2, the , which operates out of Cedar Park, Texas. (Firefly’s first lander successfully landed on the moon March 2).

Blue Ghost 2 will touch down on the moon’s far side and observe radio waves emanating from space far beyond the Milky Way Galaxy. Burns noted that these faint signals could give scientists clues to a hidden period in the history of the cosmos called the “Dark Ages”—a time just before the first stars and galaxies formed in the early universe about 100 million years after the Big Bang.

Burns explained that the moon’s far side provides scientists with an unprecedented opportunity to view these signals, in part because the region is shielded from the radio noise of technology on Earth. LuSEE-Night is also led by UC Berkeley.

“We are carrying 40 kilograms, or 88 pounds, of batteries with us, which will allow LuSEE-Night to potentially survive on the lunar surface for two years and operate at night,” Burns said. “That’s the quiet time on the moon because there’s no noise coming from the sun.”

Getting to the bottom of the domes

Firefly’s next lander boasts not one but two instruments with involvement from CU Boulder scientists.

Blue Ghost 3 will head for a puzzling region of the moon known as the Gruithuisen Domes. These rounded mountains rise to nearly a mile above the moon’s surface and were formed by lava rich in silica.

Hayne explained that on Earth, silica tends to only appear in large quantities in lava formed by the churn of plate tectonics. What these silica-rich features are doing on the moon, which has no continental plates, remains a mystery.

The planetary scientist joined a team led by the University of Central Florida that is trying to answer that question. A rover known as the (Lunar-VISE) will detach from the Blue Ghost lander and roll around this region of the moon. Lena Heffern, a systems engineer at LASP, and Margaret Landis, a research scientist at LASP, are co-investigators on the Lunar-VISE mission. Hayne is leading work on an infrared camera that will sit on the lander and help to identify the nearby minerals.

"It's an exciting opportunity to combine measurement techniques from the Lunar-VISE instruments to understand the evolution and history of lunar volcanism at this unusual location," Landis said.

The Space and Mission Systems division of the Colorado-based company BAE Systems, formerly Ball Aerospace, is building Lunar-VISE’s science instruments.

Burns and his colleagues, meanwhile, are getting a second moon shot of sorts.

The astrophysicist previously participated in the ROLSES experiment led by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. When the Odysseus spacecraft touched down on the moon, it tipped onto its side, which limited how much data the ROLSES team was able to collect.

Now, the same researchers are launching ROLSES 2, which boasts a few improvements on the original design. The new instrument will include four antennas and, like LuSEE-Night, will collect radio waves—in this case, not just from the Milky Way but also from our own planet, moon and sun.

Burns explained that radio waves coming from Earth can tell scientists a lot about the magnetic fields that surround the globe. He hopes that the team’s data will help scientists search for potentially habitable planets beyond Earth’s solar system, what scientists call “exoplanets.”

“We know that on Earth, the magnetic field is essential for life because it shields us from dangerous radiation in space,” he said. “If we can learn more about these radio emissions, we may one day be able to measure the strength of magnetic fields around exoplanets.”

ROLSES 2 is also led by NASA Goddard in close partnership with CU Boulder.

Scaling mountains

Hayne will take part in one more CLPS mission set to launch in 2027. Intuitive Machines’ fourth and final planned lander, which doesn’t yet have a name borrowed from Greek mythology, is heading for the region around Mons Mouton. It is one of the tallest mountains on the moon, rising to nearly 20,000 feet above the surface.

The lander will carry a camera called the (L-CIRiS), which is similar to the camera flying aboard Blue Ghost 3. (L-CIRiS was also built by BAE Systems). The device will measure temperatures across the lunar surface, including around the shadows tucked behind boulders and inside craters. Those images could help future space explorers know where to look for water frozen into ice on the moon.

“These are measurements we’ve never been able to make before,” Hayne said.

After decades of waiting, Burns is eager for what the next few years will hold.

“This is something I tell my students—to never accept ‘no,’” he said.