NASA's lunar trail blazer hitch rides the moon and maps water for astronauts

February 28: This article was updated to include an announcement from NASA on Thursday night about the situation in Lunar Trailblazer Spacecraft.

The moon is not dry bones, scientists now know. But how many drops of water does a thirsty astronaut find? No one knows for sure.

Launched Wednesday night from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the robotic NASA spacecraft called the Lunar Trailblazer aims to provide detailed maps from orbits of water abundance, distribution and form across the moon.

The Lunar Trailblazer was tagged to ride the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket space as the Athena, a commercial lunar lander built by intuitive Houston machinery.

Athena studies one spot a month. Lunar Trailblazer offers global photos of the moon water.

“It's another exciting thing for us,” said Nicola Fox, a pre-release press conference, at a press conference before its release, “It's another exciting thing for us,” as more science is put into space with a single launch.”

Less than an hour after the lift-off, Lunar Trailblazer and Athena went their separate ways. Athena is on a direct path to the moon, with landing scheduled for March 6th, but Lunar Trailblazer set out on a meandering, fuel-efficient journey that takes four months to reach its destination.

On Thursday, NASA reported that the spacecraft had experienced “intermittent power system problems” and that the California Institute of Technology mission controller lost contact with the spacecraft earlier in the day.

A few hours later, the Lunar Trailblazer turned on the transmitter, and the mission controller was trying to diagnose the problem and come up with possible fixes, NASA said.

If the Lunar Trailblazer is able to go to the lunar orbit, observe the lunar surface for at least two years.

One area of ​​interest is the waters of areas illuminated by the moon sun.

“Does it change as a function of time?” said Bethany Elman, a professor of planetary science at California Institute of Technology, who serves as the mission's lead researcher, in an interview. “You could think of it as something like frost coming and going.”

For decades, the moon has been considered a world without water. However, the spacecraft, which began in the mid-1990s, found evidence of ice in the eternal shadows of the lunar polar craters.

In 2009, NASA denounced the rocket stage against one of the craters. The clear color signature of the water was seen on the fragments kicked by the impact, confirming previous hints.

In the same year, scientists made the surprising discovery that water was observed not only inside the pole crater, but also around the moon. It came from observation of reflected light from a NASA instrument riding on Chandrayaan-1, India's first lunar orbit.

If the water is spreading in some way, especially if a substantial amount of water can be easily extracted from the soil, it could mitigate future settlements of the moon. The water molecules can then be split to produce oxygen for the astronaut's breathable air. Hydrogen and oxygen can also be used to fuel or generate electricity using rockets.

However, instruments mounted on Indian spacecraft designed to identify minerals on their surfaces did not completely cover the band of wavelengths needed to identify how water was placed.

Molecules may have been stacked as ice crystals or stuck to the surface of the mineral. He is called a scientist. These forms of water are probably not that difficult to collect.

However, this signal may also refer to hydroxyl, a molecular group consisting of one hydrogen atom and one oxygen atom, in contrast to two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.

Hydroxyl is likely trapped in rocks, but can be released as water when heated to about 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. This requires an oven that fouls energy to bake piles of rocks.

The Lunar Trailblazer carries a scientific sensor built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, similar to the one that rode the Chandrayaan-1. However, new equipment is even more advanced, covering all the wavelengths needed to distinguish between ice, adsorbed water and hydroxyl.

The instrument can even be viewed in areas with shadows of the moon. This is not completely dark as sunlight often bounces indirectly into the crater. “That's the most enjoyable part,” Dr. Eleman said. “It's practically a kind of double bounce of light.”

The second instrument, built by the University of Oxford in the UK, measures the temperature of the surface. “The two devices work together to obtain this simultaneous dataset of water temperature and mineral composition at the same time in the same location,” Dr. Ehlmann said.

Lunar Trailblazer is one of NASA's series of low-cost, high-risk robot science missions. The cost of building and operating the spacecraft is $94 million. However, as a secondary payload for an intuitive machine mission, it cost only $8 million to reach space, much less than NASA had purchased the rocket just to launch the Lunar Trailblazer.

This is the third mission to launch from a program called Small, Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration or Simplex. The first two failed when they reached the space.

When NASA's Psyche Spacecraft issues delayed the launch and changed tracks, two other simple spacecraft lost their ride. One of them, Janus, was to study the asteroid, but was cancelled.

Another Escapepade for measuring Mars' magnetic fields has been moved to the debut of Newglen, the orbital rocket of Blue Origin, a space company founded by Jeff Bezos. However, that mission was moved when the new Glenn seemed not ready to fill its tight launch window to send it on a specific path to Mars. It's still waiting for release.

Lunar Trailblazer also experienced a change in travel. Originally planned to ride with interstellar mapping and acceleration probe missions, or IMAP, but as the IMAP mission faced delays, it was moved to intuitive machine boot.

“Lunar Trailblazer is being held at a lucky time,” Dr. Ehlmann said, “Because there is a lot of interest in the moon, it means there is an opportunity to ride the moon.”