Texting on the Moon? Streaming on Mars? It may not be as far away as you think.
That’s the shared vision of NASA and Nokia, who have partnered to set up a cellular network on the Moon to help lay the building blocks for long-term human presence on other planets.
A SpaceX rocket is due to launch this year — the exact date has yet to be confirmed — carrying a simple 4G network to the Moon. The lander will install the system at the Moon’s south pole and then it will be remotely controlled from Earth.
“The first challenge to getting a network up and running is having a space-qualified cellular equipment that meets the appropriate size, weight, and power requirements, as well as being deployed without a technician,” Walt Engelund, deputy associate administrator for programs at NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, told CNN. No less of a challenge, it will need to operate in the harsh lunar environment of extreme temperatures and radiation.
The 4G network unit is being built by Nokia’s Bell Labs using a range of off-the-shelf commercial components. It will be loaded onto a lander made by US company Intuitive Machines, and once deployed it will connect the lander via radio equipment to two roaming vehicles with their own special mission: to search for ice.
One of the vehicles, the Lunar Outpost rover, will explore the area known as Shackleton Connecting Ridge, while the other, the Micro-Nova hopper, will plunge into a crater to scan for unprecedented up-close evidence of Moon ice.
Images of ice — transmitted back to the lander and then Earth in near real-time via the cellular network — would be a world-first. Lunar ice could be used to create breathable oxygen, and even fuel that could eventually be used to launch Mars missions from the Moon.
For NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon this decade, cellular connectivity is invaluable.
Currently, astronauts talk to each other by radio, but NASA wants a lunar communications system capable of supporting high-resolution video and science data, said Engelund — especially as Artemis missions become more sophisticated.