NASA engineers are dusting off a 20-year-old science instrument for a series of upcoming Moon landing missions
NASA has contracted with two private companies so far to build landers for a series of uncrewed science missions to the Moon, with the first launches planned for 2021. The uncrewed lander missions are the first phase of NASA’s Artemis program, with the ambitious eventual goals of crewed Moon landings, an orbital lunar outpost, and lunar mining.
Now the agency wants to know how much of that exhaust sticks around in the regolith and how much of it drifts through the exosphere to eventually settle at the poles or on other parts of the lunar surface. SEAL will also help researchers understand how temperature affects easily-evaporated compounds like water and carbon dioxide on the Moon, and how stable water ice deposits in the lunar soil might be.
To avoid the risk of accidentally seeding Mars with terrestrial life – which would spell disaster for any native life on Mars, not to mention confusing the daylights out of future astrobiologists – Nozomi had to be sacrificed. The spacecraft got only a brief look at Mars during a single, 1,000 km distance flyby, and then flew out of the history books on a two-year orbit around the Sun, which would eventually end the way all heliocentric orbits must.
“We need these kinds of measurements at multiple sites across the lunar surface to build our understanding of the three-dimensional, natural lunar exosphere and how it responds to perturbations such as rocket exhaust,” explained NASA planetary scientist Barbara Cohen, principle investigator for another instrument called the PROSPECT Ion-Trap Mass Spectrometer, in a recent NASA press release.
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