For the first time, NASA has detected a signal from the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) nearly 250,000 miles from Earth.
The signal was part of the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) experiment, a co-mission between NASA and the Italian Space Agency.
Being able to make use of GPS signals will allow future missions to rely on automation rather than human operators.
Perhaps the crown jewel of NASA’s near-term roadmap for human space exploration is the Artemis mission: our return-trip to the Moon that’s more than half a century in the making. However, this time (if all goes well), our visit to the lunar surface won’t be a one-off mission. Instead, it will serve as a major step toward permanent habitation of Earth’s only natural satellite.
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However, that journey toward creating a lunar civilization is littered with immensely difficult hurdles. Radiation is one big one (seeing as the Moon is awash in the stuff), as is the acquisition or creation of necessities like air, water, and food. But the bus doesn’t stop at major inconveniences—there are also some minor ones that make habitation on the Moon difficult, and that includes a lack of GPS.
On Earth, the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) does more than just provide hyper-accurate directions—it’s the backbone of the world economy. It’s also vital for accurate automation, which will be crucial on the Moon, as some form of robotics will be needed to do a lot of the heavy lifting. To that end, earlier this week, NASA (in partnership with the Italian Space Agency) cleared this technological hurdle by receiving signals from the GNSS system on the lunar surface as part of the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) experiment. This marks the first time humans have ever used GPS on the Moon.
“On Earth we can use GNSS signals to navigate in everything from smartphones to airplanes,” NASA’s Kevin Coggins said in a press statement. “Now, LuGRE shows us that we can successfully acquire and track GNSS signals at the Moon. This is a very exciting discovery for lunar navigation, and we hope to leverage this capability for future missions.”
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On March 2, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander touched down on the lunar surface (which is located some 225,000 miles away from Earth) and subsequently delivered LuGRE. At 2 a.m. EST on March 3, NASA successfully tracked signals from two satellites in the GNSS constellation (GPS and Galileo) on the lunar surface. While that alone is an impressive milestone that surpasses the previous GPS distance record—held by the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, which launched back in 2015—LuGRE also continued receiving a GNSS signal while in orbit around the Moon, pushing the ultimate distance traveled by the signal out to a staggering 243,000 miles from Earth.
Usually, NASA tracks spacecraft using human operators and ground-based racing stations. But the confirmation of acquiring of GNSS signal in lunar orbit will be a huge boon for automating navigation both around the Moon and in cislunar orbit, which is the destination of choice for NASA’s Gateway space station.
For LuGRE—the first Italian-made space hardware to ever land on the Moon—the mission is only beginning. It will continue to operate continuously for the next two weeks, hopefully providing even more good news about GNSS’s capabilities on the lunar surface.
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Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.