CU Boulder NASA instruments ‘critical’ to Artemis lunar missions

The University of Colorado Boulder is building three instruments that will fly in NASA’s Artemis missions and help prepare astronauts to land on the moon for the first time since the Apollo missions.

All three instruments will fly before the anticipated launch of Artemis 3 in 2026, which will take humans back to the moon and focus on exploring the moon’s south polar region.

CU Boulder Assistant Professor Paul Hayne said the goal of the missions before Artemis 3 is to close “knowledge gaps” about the moon. He and his team at CU Boulder are working on two instruments that hope to answer essential questions about the moon before humans land again.

“These robotic missions are critical to the success of the Artemis program, particularly the Artemis 3 mission,” Hayne said.

One of the instruments Hayne developed with colleagues and graduate students at CU Boulder is called the Lunar Compact Infrared Imaging System, or L-CIRiS, which is an infrared heat sensing camera. L-CIRiS will deploy to the unexplored south pole of the moon near where Artemis 3 will land.
From left: University of Colorado Boulder aerospace engineering major Katy McCutchan and electrical engineering major Alexis Muniz demonstrate remotely deploying radio telescopes on the moon in the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy offices at Folsom Field on Wednesday. (Matthew Jonas/Staff Photographer)
From left: University of Colorado Boulder aerospace engineering major Katy McCutchan and electrical engineering major Alexis Muniz demonstrate remotely deploying radio telescopes on the moon in the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy offices at Folsom Field on Wednesday. (Matthew Jonas/Staff Photographer)

Hayne said scientists believe there are ice deposits on the moon, so this instrument will help find ice deposits. Ice deposits could be crucial in the next step of moon exploration, which is to build infrastructure on the moon for a sustained presence of astronauts, Hayne said.

CU Boulder Astrophysics Professor Jack Burns said the goal after Artemis is to build a science base on the moon, similar to the McMurdo Station in Antarctica, so humans can continue exploring the moon and use the base as a waypoint to continue exploring the solar system.

Water is expensive to transport, Hayne said, so scientists need to learn how to live off the land to some degree before they can sustain a presence there. Hayne said scientists believe ice deposits could be useful for rocket fuel and drinking water in future missions .

“I find it really fascinating that we can go to another world, another planetary body, and explore,” Hayne said. “It’s really the shore of the cosmic ocean and the next frontier in space.”

L-CIRiS will also measure surface composition of the moon to find out how the it formed and how its crustal rocks evolve through time. The changing of the lunar surface over millions of years has implications for life on earth, Hayne said.

The instrument will also measure the properties of the moon’s surface materials on the south pole of the moon. Hayne said the consistency and texture of the lunar surface impacts how astronauts can walk, drive rovers and collect samples.

The second instrument Hayne is developing with his team at CU Boulder is called L-VCIRiS, which will be an instrument on a rover deployed to find out how volcanic domes — like the Gruithuisen Domes — form on the moon without plate tectonics like on Earth.

The L-CIRiS and L-VCIRis instruments are being built in collaboration with Ball Aerospace in Boulder. Both were scheduled for launch in fall of 2023, but delays from the company building the lander pushed back the anticipated launch date to late 2026 or early 2027.

Burns is a co-investigator on the ROLSES instrument, or the Radio wave Observation at the Lunar Surface of the photoElectron Sheath. It will be the first radio telescope to land on the moon and it’s scheduled for launch in November.

Burns and his students spent more than five years designing software that will be used to calibrate and analyze the telescope’s data.

Once landed on the south pole of the moon, ROLES will collect data about the lunar environment, sun and sky using low radio frequencies. Burns said the data it collects will help NASA prepare for astronauts to land safely on the moon during Artemis 3 in 2026.

For example, the telescope will collect information about shock waves and energetic particles sent out by the sun, which can be harmful to astronauts traveling or walking on the surface of the moon and can disrupt electronics. Additionally, the same navigation software used to land the lander will be used to land Artemis 3.

“This will give us experience in doing precision landing in a really rugged terrain,” Burns said. “We’ve never been to the south pole before with astronauts.”

On Aug. 23, India became the first country to successfully land an unmanned spacecraft on the south pole of the moon and the fourth country to have a successful moon landing. The telescope Burns is creating will also land on the south pole of the moon, and it will be part of the first commercially created lander to go to the moon.

“It’s great that there are so many nations and individual companies that are working to be able to (go to the moon) and do it for purposes other than just winning a political race,” Burns said, referring to the space race in the 1960s and 1970s between the United States and Russia. “Instead, they’re doing it for engineering, doing it for science and understanding the moon and how we explore.”