Mar 05, 2025 03:52 PM IST
The new milestone means NASA’s exploration missions could benefit from these signals to accurately and autonomously determine their position, velocity and time.
For the first time ever, NASA used GPS on the Moon. This means that for the first time, signals from the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) were received and tracked on the Moon.
The milestone was achieved by NASA and the Italian Space Agency on March 3 when the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) received and tracked GPS signals.
These results mean Artemis missions, or other exploration missions, could benefit from these signals to accurately and autonomously determine their position, velocity, and time, NASA said.
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What are GNSS signals?
GNSS signals transmit information about positioning, navigation and timing using radio waves and are broadcast by satellites orbiting the Earth.
There are several GNSS constellations provided by governments around the world, including GPS, Galileo, BeiDou, and GLONASS.
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How did LuGRE reach the Moon?
LuGRE was taken to the Moon aboard Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, which touched down on the Moon on March 2. LuGRE was one of the 10 NASA payloads which the Blue Ghost delivered to the Moon.
Soon after landing, LuGRE payload operators at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, began conducting their first science operation on the lunar surface.
LuGRE achieved a navigation fix approximately 2.25 lakh miles away from Earth. The technology will continue to operator continuously for 14 days, leading to additional GNSS milestones. LuGRE is also the first Italian Space Agency developed hardware on the Moon, a milestone for the organization.
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On January 21, LuGRE surpassed the highest altitude GNSS signal acquisition ever recorded at nearly 2.10 lakh miles from Earth, a record formerly held by NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission.
Its altitude record continued to climb as LuGRE reached lunar orbit on February 20 — 2.43 lakh miles from Earth. This means that missions in cislunar space, the area of space between Earth and the Moon, could also rely on GNSS signals for navigation fixes.
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