NASA's Lunar Flashlight to study the ice on Moon's south pole, mission to launch in 2022

After building some of the largest rocket engines, engineers at NASA’s Marshall Flight Center have developed one of the smallest propulsion systems in its history. This system will be used to propel a new NASA mission named Lunar Flashlight which will be launched to the Moon later this year.

According to NASA, this Lunar Flashlight is a CubeSat that will shine light onto the permanently shadowed surface of the lunar pole using its near-infrared lasers. Once launched, Lunar Flashlight will take roughly six months to reach the Moon, and will begin its two-month primary mission after achieving a polar orbit.

Lunar Flashlight to seek out water on the Moon

Scientists have known that water exists on the Moon but is deposited on the lunar surface in form of ice. No larger than a briefcase, the Lunar Flashlight will seek these ice deposits to determine where they exist on the surface and if they are enough to sustain future lunar colonies and power advanced lunar habitats and laboratories. Scientists also believe that these deposits can be collected and purified for drinking water or converted into breathable oxygen or even into rocket fuel.

The prospect of lunar water is extremely promising because apart from eliminating the need to carry water for astronauts from Earth, it would also help establish a permanent fuel depot on the Moon. Since lunar ice can be converted into hydrogen and oxygen, the basic ingredients of rocket fuel, it would also enable future deep-space missions to Mars and even beyond.

"The mission will demonstrate our ability to use powerful, compact propulsive CubeSats for a variety of science missions at the Moon and across the solar system", Daniel Cavender, manager of the project at Marshall said in a statement. "That’s a game-changing capability for exploration and planetary science."

More about the Lunar Flashlight

The CubeSat has been developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and will launch in a few months aboard SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. As for its development, Cavender said, "We had to scale the propulsion technology down to something that could fit into a backpack, yet with all the same challenges of larger propulsion systems". The propulsion system was delivered from Marshal to JPL in May last year for integration into the spacecraft and will be shipped back to Marshal for fuelling before its launch from the Kennedy Space Center.