• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

NASA Shot Laser At Japanese Lunar Lander From Orbit In Major Test

August 1, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

There is no GPS on the Moon – so to find where things land and go, we have to rely on orbital observations. To make this work easier, NASA has developed an ingenious object that doesn’t require power to make its presence known: You put it on top of your lander and you are ready to be found, then you wait for NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to shoot a laser at you. It worked for the Vikram rover, and has now worked for Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) too.

Advertisement

SLIM is a Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency lander, and Vikram is a mission from the Indian Space Research Organisation. With these landers, the Asian nations became the fourth and fifth countries to land on the Moon. NASA Laser Retroreflector Arrays have hitched a ride on both of them so they can be tested out.

The device on SLIM is the size of a cookie, 5 centimeters (2 inches) across. It has eight quartz corner-cube prisms set into a dome-shaped aluminum frame. Thanks to those, it can reflect light coming from multiple directions. LRO can use its laser altimeter to hit it and record the light that bounces back.

“LRO’s altimeter wasn’t built for this type of application, so the chances of pinpointing a tiny retroreflector on the Moon’s surface are already low,” Xiaoli Sun, who led the team that built SLIM’s retroreflector at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center as part of a partnership between NASA and JAXA, said in a statement.

But there was a complication: SLIM landed on its side, so it wasn’t easy to actually get a ping from the retroreflector. The first eight attempts led to nothing. It was only the ninth and tenth attempts that resulted in a signal back. It took multiple attempts for Vikram as well, but there, the team didn’t have to make sure they knew exactly where the location of the lander was. To confirm the signal was from SLIM, that was necessary.

Still, it shows that the system works – even in unexpected conditions. A future system of positioning involving the retroreflectors would have an orbital partner actually designed to do such a job. LRO’s altimeter is not bespoke. So the fact that the system works even at an angle is great.  

Advertisement

“For the LRO team to have reached a retroreflector that faces sideways, instead of the sky, shows that these little devices are incredibly resilient,” Sun added.

The system could be used in future crewed and uncrewed missions to land closer to other spacecraft or objects already on the surface of the Moon.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Sendoso nabs $100M as its corporate gifting platform passes 20,000 customers
  2. Caterpillar-Like Bacteria Can Cling To Your Mouth Thanks To Clever Evolution Trick
  3. Bright Yellow Daffodils Are Super Easy To Grow In Your Garden
  4. Do US Communities Have Distinct Personality Types?

Source Link: NASA Shot Laser At Japanese Lunar Lander From Orbit In Major Test

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version