5 upcoming trips to the moon and how ���������� scientists are involved

View of the Earth from space with the legs of a spacecraft in the foreground

Selfie taken by "Athena," a lunar lander built by the company Intuitive Machines, which launched for the moon Feb. 26. (Credit: Intuitive Machines)

The next few years will be a busy time for the ��’s “lunatics”—what astrophysicist Jack Burns calls scientists who have a passion for exploring the moon.

Paul Hayne

Jack Burns

Researchers at the university, including Burns and planetary scientist Paul Hayne, are taking part in five upcoming lander missions through NASA’s (CLPS) initiative—the first slated to touch down later this week. CLPS is an ambitious effort to deliver science and technology to the lunar surface by landing spacecraft built by private companies on the moon.

The new missions will explore everything from volcanoes on the moon’s surface to signals washing through our galaxy from the dawn of the universe.

“When we last landed on the moon during the Apollo era, the sorts of experiments that could be done were limited based on the technology they had at the time,” said Hayne, a scientist at the (LASP) at ��. “For the first time, we have the opportunity to deploy many different kinds of instruments on the lunar surface to make these up-close measurements.”

The new CLPS deliveries follow up on a successful experiment called Radio wave Observations at the Lunar Surface of the photo Electron Sheath (ROLSES). This instrument landed on the moon last year aboard a lander named Odysseus built by the Texas-based company . Burns was a co-investigator on ROLSES, which recorded radio waves originating from Earth-based transmitters and from the Milky Way Galaxy.

For Burns, a professor emeritus in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences (APS), the event was a long time in the making. The moon, he said, is a scientific laboratory like no other.

“I heard ‘no’ for decades. ‘We can’t go back to the moon. It’s a fantasy,’” Burns said. “But the science was so exciting and important that we stuck with it. And today, it’s happening.”

Here is a sampling of ��’s upcoming trips to the moon:

3D mapping the moon

The lunar festivities kicked off in late February with the launch of a , the successor to Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus. Athena is scheduled to land near the moon’s South Pole March 6 where it will deploy a rover that’s less than 2 feet long.

Aboard the rolling robot will be a camera based on technology from an old Xbox Kinect gaming system.

That camera, , will generate the first up-close, 3D map of this part of the moon’s surface—capturing even small nooks and crannies in incredible detail. Hayne and Patrick O’Brien, a postdoctoral researcher at LASP, are spearheading an effort to use those maps to recreate information about temperatures across the moon’s surface. The Moon3D mission is led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Colorado-based company Lunar Outpost is building the lander.

“’Micro-cold traps,’ craters as small as a penny that never see the sun, could harbor abundant ice deposits that provide crucial insights into the history of water on the moon,” O’Brien said.

Athena launched Feb. 26 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

On Feb. 26, Intuitive Machine's "Athena" lander launched from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in Florida. (Credit: NASA)

Illustration of a spacecraft sitting on the surface of the moon

Artist's depiction of a Draper lunar lander on the surface of the moon. (Credit: NASA)

Protecting astronauts from electric charges

After ROLSES, Burns’ next moon experiment is positively electric. The , in partnership with the Japanese company iSpace, will head to the moon’s Schrödinger Basin next year—a nearly 200-mile-wide impact crater on the lunar far side, or the part of the moon that never faces Earth.

From there, the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Lite (LuSEE-Lite) instrument will map out the electric charges that hover just above the moon’s surface—similar to the forces that make your socks stick together in the dryer. Those charges could pose risks to future astronauts on the moon. LuSEE-Lite consists of a single antenna that will stick up more than 20 feet from the lander.

Burns serves as a co-investigator on the mission, which is led by the University of California, Berkeley.��

Tuning in to the ancient universe

A similar instrument known as LuSEE-Night will build on data from LuSEE-Lite, with a dark twist. It’s flying aboard Blue Ghost 2, the , which operates out of Cedar Park, Texas. (Firefly’s first lander successfully landed on the moon March 2).

Blue Ghost 2 will touch down on the moon’s far side and observe radio waves emanating from space far beyond the Milky Way Galaxy. Burns noted that these faint signals could give scientists clues to a hidden period in the history of the cosmos called the “Dark Ages”—a time just before the first stars and galaxies formed in the early universe abo

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