Lunar IceCube to Detect Water on the Moon Putting humans in space requires packing everything they need to survive aboard the spacecraft: food, water, clothing, even air to breathe. Using resources found on other planets can bring crewed missions within reach. NASA is now on a quest to identify water and other resources that can benefit the upcoming Artemis missions. “The Lunar IceCube is a CubeSat that will orbit the Moon searching for signs of water ice on the lunar surface that may be useful for Artemis and future exploration missions,” said Terry Hurford, instrument scientist for Lunar IceCube’s near-infrared point spectrometer. “If you were to send a crewed mission there, they would need drinking water, but water can also be used as a fuel source when broken down into hydrogen and oxygen.”
Photo credit: NASA/Mark Lupisella
cuttingedge • goddard’s emerging technologies
Volume 18 • Issue 1 • Fall 2021
LunarIceCube, which fits in a package as big as a briefcase, will do big science finding molecular water on the Moon.
A second goal of the mission is to understand the water dynamics on the Moon, which can provide insight into the Moon’s origin.
four microns — to identify different compounds on the Moon. Water can be identified at wavelengths around three microns.
Lunar IceCube has been integrated as a secondary payload of the Space Launch System (SLS), which will launch later this year on the Artemis I mission.
The BIRCHES instrument, roughly the size of an eight-inch tissue box, occupies about one-third of the volume of Lunar IceCube. The team had to drastically miniaturize legacy hardware from OSIRIS-REx to approximately one-sixth of its original size. In addition to BIRCHES, the briefcasesized satellite contains a power system, propulsion system, and communications system.
This CubeSat will build upon NASA’s previous investigations into water on the Moon. The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) detected, for the first time, water molecules on a sunlit portion of the Moon, NASA announced in October of last year. Following previous observations of hydrogen on the lunar surface, this discovery confirmed water’s existence on the Moon. Two years before SOFIA’s detection, NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument, aboard the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, identified evidence of water ice at the Moon’s poles by measuring reflection and absorption properties. The Broadband InfraRed Compact High-resolution Explorer Spectrometer (BIRCHES), built at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center for Lunar IceCube, will continue to refine our understanding of water resources on the Moon. BIRCHES breaks down near-infrared light — wavelengths between one and PAGE 10
The CubeSat dispenser on the Orion stage adapter limited the size of the spacecraft, and thus the BIRCHES instrument. “We were trying to create a very small instrument and squeeze it inside of a very small spacecraft,” said Goddard’s Lunar IceCube Manager Mark Lupisella. BIRCHES needs to reach a very cold temperature, which, when combined with its small size packed inside a small spacecraft, makes for unique thermal management challenges. A deployable copper radiator will flip up after the spacecraft is deployed. “It’s a fairly elegant solution to help provide a lowmass, low-volume radiative surface that helps get
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