The Apollo 8 mission in December 1968 did something that had never been done before. The main task of Apollo 8, which was the first to go near the Moon and returned to Earth after 10 orbits around the Moon, was to explore the landing surfaces on the Moon. They were also successful, and the 3 astronauts in Apollo 8 laid the groundwork for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, who would later take part in the Apollo 11 shuttle that will be launched into space when we come to 1969, and will go down in human history for the first time on the Moon’s surface. NASA is now involved in a similar study.
As it is known, the GPS system does not work on the Moon. For this reason, NASA, which thinks that the astronauts who will go there can easily get lost, is working on a special GPS system to accelerate its manned work on the Moon’s surface. The name of the system is Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE), aka Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment. The GNSS mentioned here is based on the Earth’s Global Navigation Satellite System, while LuGRE has a specific GPS meaning for the Moon that will use signals from GNSS.
NASA plans to land the LuGRE receiver on the Moon’s surface in 2024 with the Blue Ghost vehicle. After landing on the surface, the LuGRE receiver will turn on its antennas and collect data for 12 days. This collected data will be used to develop an operational lunar GNSS system for future missions to the lunar surface. In other words, we can roughly say that NASA will map the Moon in detail and prepare a navigation system based on it.
We will see together how these works of NASA will benefit in the future, but we can already foresee more manned lunar explorations in the near future.
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