The Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft, which will launch from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, carries a state-of-the-art camera designed by a team of University of Oxford scientists
Scientists are gearing up to send a spacecraft to the Moon to map its water resources, potentially aiding future colonisation efforts. The Lunar Trailblazer, set to take off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida this week, is equipped with an advanced camera developed by University of Oxford experts.
The state-of-the-art camera will gauge the lunar surface temperature and pinpoint potential water sources for extraction. Professor Neil Bowles from the University of Oxford’s physics department said that the mission will be “useful scientifically to understand the lunar water cycle and it is also important as a potential for future human exploration”.
Since 2009, when Indian and American spacecraft found signs of hydrated minerals, there’s been speculation about lunar water. “Although it is a relatively small spacecraft, around 200 kilogrammes, it has a very important science goal,” Prof Bowles stated.
“We think there is water at the Moon’s poles as ice and that there may be very thin layers of water on the surface,” Prof Bowles continued, adding “the Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft’s mission is to try to map and understand this”. The Trailblazer is scheduled for launch aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket at 7.17pm Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday, which translates to 17 minutes past midnight in the UK on Thursday, at the earliest, within a four-day launch window.
It will share the journey with Intuitive Machine’s privately owned Athena lunar lander and a probe ship made by an asteroid mining company. Once it detaches from the Falcon 9 rocket, Trailblazer’s relatively small engines will cleverly utilise the gravitational forces of the Sun, Moon, and Earth for navigation to the lunar surface.
Onboard is the Lunar Thermal Mapper (LTM) camera, a high-tech instrument crafted by Oxford boffins thanks to a generous £3.1 million purse from the UK Space Agency and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. This nifty camera’s job is to record the Moon’s surface temperature.
Meanwhile, an instrument known as the HVM3, made by scientists at Nasa’s jet propulsion laboratory, will measure how sunlight is absorbed and reflected by water layers.
Prof Bowles shared his anticipation for the mission, which aims to shed light on lunar soil chemistry, the feasibility of lunar water sources, and the potential to manufacture additional water if needed.
He lauded his team’s dedication, saying, “The team worked extremely hard to get the instrument built, doing a lot of the work during the pandemic in a really challenging environment. But we got there in the end, which is the most important thing, and now we are ready to go to the Moon.”
