NASA’s Lunar Flashlight has spoken with mission controllers and confirmed its good health after taking off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Sunday, December 11 at 2:38 a.m. EST (Saturday, December 10, at 11:38 p.m. PST).
The small satellite, or SmallSat, was released from its dispenser 53 minutes after launch to start a four-month trip to the Moon in search of surface water ice in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar South Pole.
“It was a beautiful launch,” said John Baker, the Lunar Flashlight project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “The whole team is excited to see this small spacecraft do some big science in a few months’ time.”
Despite the fact that Lunar Flashlight will never touch down on our planet, there is still time for people to glimpse the tiny spacecraft. An eye-catching 3D graphic representation of the solar-powered SmallSat has been unveiled in NASA's Eyes on the Solar System project.
The spacecraft's avatar is an exact replica of the real object, right down to the science equipment, thrusters, and four solar arrays. Users can alter their perspective of the SmallSat and observe where it is in space by dragging their finger or mouse, whether it is on a lengthy journey to the moon or while it is gathering science data while zooming above the lunar surface.
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A reflectometer with four lasers that emit near-infrared light at wavelengths easily absorbed by surface water ice will be used by Lunar Flashlight. The Moon's dark areas, which haven't seen sunlight in billions of years, will be probed for the first time with multiple coloured lasers to look for ice.
In order to determine the distribution of surface water ice on the Moon for potential use by future humans, the scienctic data gathered by the mission will be compared with observations obtained by other lunar missions.
HAKUTO-R Mission 1 and Lunar Flashlight both launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket together. JPL, a subsidiary of Caltech in Pasadena, California, is in charge of managing Lunar Flashlight for NASA.
The mission's lead researcher, Barbara Cohen, is situated at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Georgia Tech students, both graduate and undergraduate, will run Lunar Flashlight. The scientific team behind the Lunar Flashlight is spread across several institutions.
