The ESA has officially kicked off Moonlight, a program whose objective will be to deploy a communications and navigation infrastructure around the Moon. It will offer valuable logistical support to future missions, and represents a real step forward in the development of a ” lunar economy ».
Until not so long ago, space missions to the Moon were rare, exceptional events, organized exclusively by a handful of leading space agencies. But the situation is changing. Under the impetus of private aerospace, which is progressing at very high speed in the wake of SpaceX, our satellite will soon experience an era of unprecedented activity. Over the next two decades alone, more than 400 missions are already planned by different space agencies as well as many companies.
A springboard for the conquest of the Moon
To support these initiatives, ESA has put together a major infrastructure plan which will begin with putting the Moonlight Lunar Communications and Navigation Services (LCNS). It is a small constellation composed of five separate machines.
The first four are satellites de navigation which will help the actors of the different missions to orient themselves around the Moon. In essence, it is a kind of lunar GPS. The last member of this quintet will be a ultra-high bandwidth, low latency communications relay. It will offer a direct connection with a set of three dedicated ground stations, thus creating a stable and efficient network more than 400,000 km away. These machines will be integrated into a commercial offer to which private companies will be able to subscribe to to facilitate their lunar missions.
This mini-armada will be strategically positioned to optimize coverage of the lunar south pole. To provide context, this is the area on which space agencies will focus their future colonization efforts from 2030.
It indeed presents a combination of permanently sunny elevated areas, ideal for the production of photovoltaic energy, and deep, constantly shaded craters which are full of potentially exploitable resources, starting with water ice.
But before getting there, we will have to start by laying some logistical foundations. This will start with the deployment of Lunar Pathfindera precursor satellite which will have the heavy responsibility of paving the way for the rest of the Moonlight constellation. It will also offer a communications relay service, certainly less efficient than that of Moonlight, but already very useful for testing a lot of other more advanced systems in good conditions. The Pathfinder is scheduled to launch in 2026, after which Moonlight services will be gradually rolled out between 2028 and 2030.
A major milestone for European aerospace
More broadly, Moonlight is also a modular and extensible system looking to the future. It is part of LunaNet, a joint initiative of the European (ESA), American (NASA) and Japanese (JAXA) space agencies. Its objective is to guarantee a certain level of compatibility and interoperability between the systems of the three partners. In the longer term, Moonlight will also serve as proof of concept for another program called MARCONI, the objective of which will be to establish a similar infrastructure around the planet Mars.
« This is a very special moment for Europe ,” said Javier Benedicto, Director of Navigation at ESA. “ The Moonlight Agreement we are signing today is the backbone of the future navigation system around and on the surface of the Moon. »
« We’re starting something huge », Adds Gabriele Pieralli, CEO of Telespazio – the Italian company which leads the industrial consortium with which the ESA will cooperate to deploy Moonlight. “ I am convinced that we do not even realize the importance of what is happening today », he adds. “ The future is before us. »
Source: www.journaldugeek.com
