NASA adds water detection instrument to Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft

Aug. 16 (UPI) -- As NASA's Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft nears completion, scientists have added a piece of equipment designed to detect water.

"Built by the University of Oxford in England and contributed by the UK Space Agency, the Lunar Thermal Mapper (LTM) joins the High-resolution Volatiles and Minerals Moon Mapper (HVM3), which was integrated with the spacecraft late last year," NASA said in a press release Wednesday.

"Together, the instruments will enable scientists to determine the abundance, location and form of the moon's water," NASA said.

Development of the Lunar Trailblazer program is being led by Cal Tech and the mission will launch no earlier than early 2024.

The Lunar Trailblazer is expected to be launched as a secondary payload on NASA's second Intuitive Machines lunar lander mission alongside NASA's Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1, which will look for samples below the lunar surface.

While in lunar orbit, the Lunar Trailblazer will use the HVM3 to scan wavelengths sunlight reflected off of water forms on the lunar surface. The mission will also use its LTM instrument to scan the terrain.

By comparing the readings at different times of day, the Lunar Trailblazer could detect if there are variations in the amount of water on the moon.

Earlier this year, scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences discovered water in impact glass which was brought from the moon to the Earth by China's Chang'e-5 lunar mission.

Impact glass is the result of meteorite impacts on the lunar surface that melt rock.

"It has been proposed that a hydrated layer exists at depth in lunar soils, buffering water cycle on the moon globally. However, a reservoir has yet to be identified for this hydrated layer," the scientists said in their paper published in the scientific journal Nature.

The mission will precede NASA's Artemis moon mission, which seeks to return astronauts to the moon.

NASA has made substantial efforts to internationalize the Artemis mission and its precursor missions.

"With the combined power of both of these sophisticated instruments we can better understand where and why water is on the Moon and support the next era of Moon exploration," said Lunar Trailblazer principal investigator Bethany Ehlmann.