Good morning everyone. I'm the CLIPS project scientist
for I am One, so I'm working with all the NASA payload teams
and Doctor Deborah Needham, our headquarters program scientists,
to ensure that operations maximize the science and
technology return from our payloads.
First, I want to give you a little overview of what CLIPS is
all about. The goal here is for us to
investigate the moon in preparation for Artemis really
to do business differently. For NASA.
One of our main goals is to make sure that we develop a lunar
economy. For clips, we NASA hitch a ride
on a lunar Lander that's developed by commercial
industry. These aren't NASA mittens,
they're commercial mittens. These commercial companies will
be bringing our instruments along for the ride, enabling our
investigations by providing power, data and calm to us.
With the commercial industry comes a competitive environment,
which means that our investment upfront ultimately gets far more
for far less. So instead of 1 mission in a
decade, it allows for more like 10 commercial missions to the
moon in a decade. Instead of four or five
instruments in that one decade, it's more like 4 to five dozen
instruments. Being risk risk tolerant allows
for high yield and high reward. And this is the beauty of clips
we'll learn from what doesn't doesn't work.
Testing many technologies. Conducting experiments at a
lower cost and significantly faster than traditional NASA
missions. This will allow us to prepare
for Artemis more efficiency, more efficiently.
When you change the frequency of missions and the risk Prosper
retains how you do things, opportunities arise for far more
science and technology investigations.
A far greater number of places you can go to on the moon, and
the diversity of people involved.
Blooms to inspire all future explorers.
This is clipped the first commercial miss, and for
intuitive Mccoons will hold a suite of six NASA payloads.
The landing site that we're going to is a relatively safe
and flat area, a little ways from the Mellippert, a crater
about 10° from the South Pole. The South Pole is generally
fairly rough area. This will give our commercial
vendor Intuitive Machines an opportunity to bring this suite
of payloads to an area that will be the farthest S that any
private Lander has ever been to on the moon.
And it will give us an opportunity to test our
instruments in this very harsh environment where the Sun is
always low on horizon, the temperature gets quite cold and
will help us keep what problems does face us in communicating
with the Earth when it's also rather low.
Our lane one payload is going to help us learn about
communicating from areas around the South Pole like this.
The NASA payloads on IM1 will also test technologies it'll
pave for the way for how to navigate to and land safely and
autonomously on the lunar surface, including NDL that
eases lasers to guide how fast and how close the Lander is
during landing. LRA That reflects laser light
right back to the incoming or orbiting spacecraft.
With the laser, to give future spacecraft a reference point on
the lunar surface lane, One will test technologies that'll act
like a lighthouse, but as a radio beacon.
Similar to how you use your GPS. R FM G will measure propellants
and fuel left in the tanks to allow for a safe landing,
ensuring that we have enough fuel when we land.
Scallops will image the engine exhaust turning up dust on the
surface. This will expose fresh surface
underneath, and the suite of cameras will then continue to
image that surface for science investigation.
And finally, Roses will investigate influences of the
Sun on the lunar surface, both for science and to help better
prepare for Artemis missions and to conduct radio astronomy for
the first time from the moon. All very exciting.
We'll defer back to you. Thank you so much, Sue.
We'll now hand it over to our eclipse payload team.
Let's begin with Farzin and the Jugarian for the navigation
Doppler lighter Farzin. Good morning navigation.
Doppler Lidar is a laser sensor that shoots 3 laser beams to the
ground and measures spacecraft velocity.
That's the speed and the direction of the flight and the
altitude above the ground is when the vehicle begins its
decent toward the landing site, so it comes on during the last
few minutes of the meeting. This is the critical phase that
every event, every maneuver, every truck, the firing has to
be perfectly on the queue. This is those minutes of terror.
By providing very precise velocity and altitude data, the
NDL enables the spacecraft to navigate this exactly to the
landing site and help it touchdown gently at the intended
location. So the NDL will play an
important role in the future landing missions as we are
moving toward landing in rough terrain and putting the Landers
at precise locations, perhaps at the edge of a Cliff or clothed
deployed assets. This I am 1 mission will be a
great demonstration of this technology for those future
missions, including human missions to the moon.
Thank you. Thank you, Farzin.
Next up we have Camera stadium for Lunar Node 1 camera.
Yes, good morning. I'm Tamara Stadium with NASA
Marshall Space Flight Center and I'm the Co Investigator for the
Lunar Node One payload Lunar Node One or lane one is a
navigation beacon demonstration. Its goal will be to demo
autonomous navigation technologies that are
desperately needed to support a growing lunar architecture.
As lunar activity increases around the moon though, 2 will
demand increase on Earth based systems like the Deep Space
Network for navigation needs. While these systems provide
great capability, the capacity will be outpaced by the number
of users. LN1 takes advantage of Cube Sat
flight hardware. It's a small platform, easily
integrated into future elements of lunar infrastructure.
LN1 utilizes the Multi Spacecraft Autonomous
Positioning System, or maps with maps.
Every lunar element serves as a node in a greater network and
nodes share packets that embed their time and state in a
standardized format. With reception of a packet, a
node is able to form range and range rate observation from a
source that is broadcasting out its local position.
In this approach, each asset can become a navigation reference L
and one will also demo A1 way ranging signal similar to that
used within GPS satellites. This enables an alternate
approach to determine distances between assets and when combined
with map transmission of position and time, allows it to
operate in a similar manner to AGPS.
Through the light lane, one demonstrates one node of a
greater network and then throughout transit and on the
surface of the Moon, the payload will broadcast telemetry pockets
to Earth where the signal will be received by the Deep Space
Network, processed and an absolution.
Compared against others like that of the Iron Lander, future
upgraded versions of Lane One will demo two way ranging
survive the night capability as well as integration capability
with the Luna net, COM and NAV infrastructure.
Thank you. Thank you so much, Tamara.
Next up we have Daniel Crimmins for the Laser Retro Reflector
Array. Daniel.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Daniel Crimmins from NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center, and I'm the deputy principal
investigator for the Laser Retro Reflector Array instrument, or
LRA, as you may know. LRA is a completely passive.
Instrument consisting of a hemispherical array of special
glass prisms called retro reflectors.
What they do is they return the light back directly towards the
illumination source. Similar optical phenomenon is
used in Rd. markers to make them shine brightly under a car's.
Headlights. On a quips flander, however, LRA
will act as a precise marker of the Lander position and that
will be visible under illumination from either a laser
ranging system on board and orbiting or landing spacecraft.
Now LRA requires no power, no thermal control or interaction
with the Lander, which allows it to be used for decades on a
lunar surface and in the challenging lunar condition
thermal conditions. LRA will be used to geolocate
the Lander on the surface with high precision, measure any
changes in the Lander position over long time periods, and
determine the precise orbit or landing trajectory of a
spacecraft illuminating it the LRA.
The LRA team is very excited to be a part of the intuitive
machines. Mission.
Thank you. Thank you so much, Daniel.
Over to you Nat Gopalswami, for the radio observations of the
lunar surface Photo electron sheet.
Nat. Hello everyone.
This is a radio telescope operating in the frequency range
from three kilowatts to 30 megahertz to observe cosmic and
terrestrial radio waves on the moon.
Low frequency cosmic radio waves cannot be detected on Earth due
to the intervening ionosphere. We also will detect the powerful
auroral kilometric radiation originating at several 1000
miles above that store various transmitted sun.
Has broadcast wide-ranging radio waves that are also appearing as
noise on the moon, adding to any noise generated by the
mechanisms on the land. The Sun emits different types of
radio bursts that will be detected by roses.
These bursts are caused by energetic electrons interacting
with solar magnetic fields. They inform us about the
physical conditions in the corona and interplanetary
medium, and also about solar flares and Coronal Mass Effect
sources. Will detect intense radio
emissions from Jupiter. Such emissions are also known
from Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The knowledge on planetary radio
mission will be helpful in detecting exoplanets using radio
telescopes in the future. Also can measure the electron
density and vertical gradient above the lunar surface.
These are photo electrons knocked off from the solar
surface by sunlight. The impact of lunar dust on
those of antennas is expected to produce detectable radio signal.
These dust impacts are known to peak at the Terminator and are
responsible for the so-called horizon glove.
Finally the radio intensity of the Milky Way Galaxy peaks and
that also frequency detecting and characterizing the galactic
background emission is important for cosmological studies.
There also this instrument on IM One is thus poised to contribute
to answering wide-ranging science questions.
Thank you. Thanks so much, Nat.
Next up is Michelle Monk for the Stereo camera for Lunar Plume
Surface Studies. Michelle, over to you.
Hi, welcome everybody. I'm Michelle Monk from the NASA
Langley Research Center and I'm the Principal investigator for
the stereo cameras for Lunar Plume, Surface Studies and
Scouts. Scouts is comprised of four
small cameras mounted near the bottom of the Odysseus Lander
and oriented so that they can view the surface under the main
engine. The cameras will take images
during vertical descent towards the moon, through touchdown and
then engine shut down. They'll continue to take images
periodically throughout the lunar day until the mission.
Using a stereo photogrammetry technique, our team will then
reconstruct A3 dimensional tape of the lunar surface to see the
extent of a Rosen that occurred during landing.
The scalps measurement is going to provide us a critical data
set, anchor computer models for predicting plume focus
interaction effects. These effects will be really
important to understand as we start to send larger Landers to
the moon and with humans, and to aggregate assets close together
to support the sustained lunar presence in Artemis.
Thank you. Thank you.
Michelle And then finally over to Lauren Amin for the radio
frequency mass gauge. Lauren.
Hi, good morning. I'm Lauren Amin.
I'm the Deputy Manager of the Cryogenic Fluid Management
Portfolio Office at the NASA Glen Research Center and I'm
here today on behalf of the Radio Frequency Mass Gauge Team
or R FM. GR FM G is one of the cryogenic
fluid management technologies and development within our
portfolio office, but RFMG and IM One will demonstrate a sensor
technology that's been in development at NASA Glen for
over the last 15 years. RFMG allows more accurate in
space cryogenic fuel gauging and spacecraft fuel tanks like those
in IM1 Noviceelander. Our engineers do this by
measuring the electromagnetic spectrum or radio waves within
the tanks throughout the mission.
Compare them to a vast fluid simulation database our team's
been building. Accurately gauge how much
propellant is inside those tanks.
RFMG has been has been proven in many ground tests.
A suborbital parabolic flight also on an experiment on the
International Space Station. RFMGS demo on IM One will
provide NASA for the very first time long duration microgravity
data that will be used to iterate and scale the technology
to enable improved spacecraft and Lander operations.
This RFMG technology is critical and enabling for future long
duration missions that use cryogenic propellants.
With our FMG could potentially say fuel and take the guesswork
out of space spacecraft design and operations in the future.
Thank you. Thank you so much, Lauren, and
thanks to our briefers for those initial remarks for awareness.
We also have some additional massive subject matter experts
on the line in case there are specific questions that come up.
We'll now open it up for questions.
Again, for those of you on the line today, please press * one
to submit a question. And once your name is called,
please state your name, affiliation and to whom you'd
like to direct your question. If you find that your question
has already been answered, press * two with Star 2 to withdraw
it. Our first question is from
Jonathan at Fox News. Jonathan, your line is now open.
Good morning, everyone. Jonathan Sarri with Fox News.
Thanks so much for doing this briefing.
My question for any of the NASA experts.
Who'd like to jump in? As you look ahead to crude
landings on the moon with the Artemis program, what would you
say is the most important thing or the biggest unknown that
you're hoping to learn about the South polar region through the
IM 1 mission? Thank you.
Take that off, sorry. First thing this is to the
project scientist for the IM1, all the the payloads.
So for the South Pole, it's a really, really harsh environment
and what we have planned for IM one really kind of concentrates
on this space landing and making for the and also communicate
back to the Earth. Sometimes when you're at a very,
very low point on the horizon, the communications can kind of
bounce along the terrain coming and going.
So having a location that's close to the South Pole will
help us to start investigating those kinds of things that are
happening. Ellen One will help us with
those investigations. And also because the environment
is quite hard, it's going to give us a baseline for
understanding things like how do solar panels work and how do the
instruments function in these very cold temperatures or warm
temperatures when the sun is shining on.
So I think it's a very good place to start having some
slightly more straightforward payloads that investigate how to
sell a pole, acts, what the environment is like to help us
with future missions. Perfect.
Thank you. Our next question comes from
Will Robinson Smith from Spaceflight Now.
Will, Your line is now open. Yes, hi, Will Robinson Smith
Space Flight. Now thank you so much for taking
the time to answer our questions.
One to Lauren and mean if I could in the data that you'll be
getting back from the radio frequency map page, is the
intent to, you know, not just for you know future clips
mission, but for the human landing system program Lander
contractor, SpaceX, Blue Origin. Principally the goal to share
that data with them to help better inform some of their
cryogenic propellant transfer. Both demonstrations as well as
the actual performance thereof during the Artemis missions that
they're a part of. Thanks.
Hey, yeah, this is Lauren. Yeah.
So the opportunity to to understand and demonstrate RFMG.
During the. Most of the transit phase of the
Odysseus Lander, it's gonna give us an opportunity to understand
how the data correlates with what I talked about that best
fluid simulation database which is really how we estimate how
how much propellant is in the tank.
Like all the other space technology projects at at NASA,
we absolutely intend on improving our our data and and
sharing that with all of our commercial partners not just
those for HLS. So hopefully that answers your
question, but absolutely, I think the intent is to infuse
this RFMG technology and. All future missions.
Where where that makes sense to really try to improve our
cryogenic food management. Capability.
Thanks, Lauren, and thanks for that question.
We're now going to hear some questions we received from our
social media platforms using the hashtag ask NASA.
And our first question comes from Instagram and it was what
type of fuel is the lunar Lander using?
Sue, I'm going to hand that question over to you to respond
to. So we're going to be using both
liquid oxygen and liquid methane.
These are both cryogenic fuels. And I'm actually going to pass
that right back over to Lauren because their team is working
very closely with Intuitive machines on their Liquid
profile. Hey, Sue, Yeah, you're correct.
Liquid oxygen, liquid methane. And I'll just say too that our
RFMG team has been working with the IM one team over the last
week during their wet dress rehearsals and those have gone
really well. And so we've we've proven out
that our RFMG pillow is is working.
Perfect. Thank you both.
Our next question from using the hashtag ask NASA comes from
Facebook and that is how much space or mass does the Lander or
the payloads take up. So for this purpose, since we
are looking at the NASA provided lunar payloads, let's talk about
how much mass the NASA payloads take up on I NS Nova C Lander
and I will give that one to sue. Sorry.
Yeah. So I think we actually have
Chris Culbert in the room and he might actually know the answer
to that question off the top of his head.
I do not. Sure.
So it's in the range of 40 kilograms.
For the first two missions that Cliff sponsored, we were a
little on the lighter side. You'll you'll probably note that
our later missions are closer to 100 kilograms.
But for I am first missing here. It's close to 40kg of NASA
payloads. Thank you both.
Now we'll go back to a couple of questions from the media.
And Next up we have Bill Harwood from CBS News.
Bill, your line is now open. Hey, thank you very much.
I have two quick questions. One from Michelle is, is, is the
payload primarily just to demonstrate the technology and
show how it works or do you expect to actually learn
something about the the soil in that region?
In other words, is there what are you expecting from that soil
at the landing site? And the second question I think
is for Susan, not no, I'm sorry, not for Susan.
Let me get my name straight here.
I'm sorry for Lauren. Can you give us a little more
info on how the the testing worked?
I mean, I don't know when they fuel your spacecraft during the
countdown or how any of that works.
Is is we don't really have any details about that.
Thanks. OK.
This is Michelle. I'll take the first part of
that. Thanks for the question.
This is actually both of technology demonstration and
hopefully some use for science. I guess I'd call it more of an
engineering measurement. But we are really excited about
the opportunity to go towards the South Pole because that is
an area as Sue mentioned that we haven't landed in before.
So we have the video from the Apollo landings in the Mari
region, where you see, you know, lots of dust blown around thrown
out from the base of the Apollo Landers, and we really want to
see if the behavior is similar at the South Pole.
Now granted, this Odysseus Lander is a much different scale
than Apollo or from the Landers descended, but this starts us on
the path of those demonstrating that this instrument can make
measurements and getting some early knowledge about the South
Pole Regulus and how it will behave.
So I hope that answers it. Thank you and.
If I can just step in real quick, this is Sue.
And one of the things that we at NASA do is when we have
instruments that are designed to gather data that can be used for
science, we have something called the Planetary Data
System, which is online where the images and the data such as
what scouts is going to be collecting.
It's actually archived for future use for scientists to
continue to use that data to understand better what the
surface of the moon is like in this case.
And this will be archived with the PDF.
And I can tell you that, at least from my past as an
astronomer using images to study different types of astronomical
bodies, the images themselves can be used to really dig in
when you see the the very close and features.
And so I expect that we're going to get some really good science
out of the imagery that's coming back from scalps without a
doubt. All right.
And this is Chris Culvert, I'll I'll I'll hit your second
question about the the ground OPS for The LOX methane.
So this is the first time we've flown LOX methane off of one of
the old settle pads 39 A. So it did require some
modification to the shuttle pads to allow the SpaceX to fuel the
Lander while it's on the pad. And because these are cryogenic
fuels that will boil off if they get too warm you you put that
fuel in pretty late. So right now, we expect they
will start fueling both the the tanks on the Lander about 3
hours before liftoff and it takes a couple of hours to fill
the tanks up. You want to make sure that they
maintain the right temperatures all the way through that load
process and you have to get the right temperature before you can
launch. But they run a couple of wet
dress rehearsals over the last week to demonstrate all that
systems that have all worked very well.
So we're looking forward to a very successful launch this
week. Thank you all.
Our next question comes from Gina Sinceri at ABC News.
Gina, your line is now open. Thank you.
This question is for Farzin. I'm interested in the Lidar
experiment. How important are lasers
becoming in this kind of exploration?
OK, yes, this is Farzin from NASA language.
That's a tough question. So as we are looking into these
more challenging, more ambitious landing missions, LIDAR and
LASER is going to be playing much as important role as we're
going forward. The navigation doctor LIDAR that
provides the velocity and altitude there is sort of can
think of it of a replacement of the radar sensors that were used
before. But the precision of this laser
sensor is at least an order of magnitude greater.
So the the quality of data, the precisions would would really
help these landing vehicle to navigate more precisely toward
the landing site. So this is just one aspect.
We are also looking at LIDAR for doing hazard detection on the
landing. That is once we are reached the
landing location and we are starting to do a vertical
descent, we want to be able to map the terrain and figure where
the hazards are. The make sure that the Lander
does not land on the piece of rock or or or a crater hole and
and that's another area that the the laser and LIDAR can play a
critical role. Yet there is another application
for the lasers that are being looked at and that is trained
relative navigation. That is, when we are way off
maybe 20-30 kilometers above the ground, using the laser to look
at the features right below and look for known features that can
give us a good position and formation.
I'm sorry for you know touching all these technologies, but let
me let me summarize them. So when we are coming down,
let's say we're going to the moon and we are starting at 3020
kilometers above the ground and we are kind of horizontally or
it's not at the path going down. The laser can look at the train
below to find known features, so we know where we are.
Then we have the navigation Doppler larger that's going to
be demonstrated on this mission to provide very precise velocity
and altitude data for the vehicle to navigate precisely to
the landing site. And once we get there, a laser
can scan the ground below and the so we can avoid the hazards
and landed vehicle between you know, rocks and craters
precisely. I I hope that answers your
question. That was great.
Farzin. Thank you both.
Thank you so much. We're going to switch gears for
a moment and go back to questions on social media using
the hashtag ask NASA from Instagram.
How will the Lander or the payloads recharge?
And can the Lander rotate to face the sun?
I'm actually going to ask Chris Culbert, program manager for
Cliff, to answer that question. Chris.
Sure. So yeah, recharging is done
through solar arrays. So the Lander will have solar
arrays on it that will capture energy from the sun, turn in
electricity, and pass it on to the payloads during transit to
the moon. Yes, the Lander will rotate or
or adjust its attitude so that the solar arrays get the right
amount of sun, sun on them so it can generate power once it lands
on the moon, No, it's landed. It doesn't move anymore.
The solar rays are not on gimbals or mechanisms that let
them change their direction. So intuitive machines have spent
a fair amount of energy analyzing where they're landing,
where the sun's going to be, and how the sun will cross the
horizon during the portion of lunar day that they're there.
And then they they they they design the Lander arrays canted
such that they capture the right amount of sunlight to generate
electricity. Thank you, Chris.
Our next question from from social media is about lunar
dust. So is moon dust analysis plan
and I think I'm going to turn that over to the SCALP team
that's on the line. This is Michelle.
I'm not quite sure about Moon dust investigation.
Back to the answer that you provided.
I think, you know, close up imagery of the regular particles
will be, you know, very instructive going forward are
our cameras will have fields of view that have Lander purposes
in them so that we can see over time if the dust moves around
and how it clings to different purposes.
And we hope to make measurements like this on future Landers so
that we can build up more knowledge of of the dust
behavior. Thanks.
Yeah, this is Albert. I'll, I'll add a little bit to
that one for Michelle. So this mission in particular is
mostly Pakistan imagery, which will tell us what how dust
behaves when it's blasted during the descent and how we'll move
around, as Michelle just described, on some future mix.
And we'll have some more advanced experiments which
actually take a look at how the dust interacts with materials
and surfaces. But that won't be on this first
mix and those are going to be in some future mix.
And if I can just add in that there's one other sensor that we
have on board and that is Roses has four radio antennas and one
of the modes that they have for collecting their science is to
actually detect dust as it impacts the antenna.
So Nat, I don't know if you want to speak a little bit about that
capability, but that can also help us understand the dust, how
it purges up and help us to design future space suits as
well to figure out how to minimize the dust cleaning to
the suits. Nat, do you have anything to
add? I would like to add that the the
dust impact actually increases that the Terminator when.
So we may have have to do some operations in the night to
understand more about this dust. So the basic detection mechanism
is dust hitting the antenna will produce a small voltage signal.
Thank you. Thank you all for responding to
that question from social media. We'll now switch it back to
questions from the media. First up, we have Kenneth Chang
with the New York Times. Kenneth, your line is now open.
Kenneth, can you hear us right? We'll go back.
Let's go over to Jeff S with Space News.
Jeff, your line is open. Good morning.
Two quick questions, one for. Farzin.
What sort of? Landing accuracy Can the
navigation Doppler Lidar provide?
How does it compare, for example, to what Japan's slim
Lander achieved last month? And then for Susan or?
Chris there any special coordination issues among the
payloads to ensure? That they all get the.
Power and communications that they need at the various phases
of the mission. Thanks.
OK, this is Farazan. I answered the first part of
your question. So navigation, Dover Lidar like
I mentioned earlier can provide very high precision velocity and
altitude data order of magnitude better than radars.
Now in terms of the precision landing, that really depends on
the vehicle itself, how it's going to use this data to
improve its precision and that's really depends on the under the
landing vehicle. And I cannot really comment
about for example this I am within me.
Now I do like to add that that I am one that an overseas vehicle
does and this mission does use the NDL data to help it with
improving its precision landing. So we are not a primary or
critical sensor on the on the vehicle, but the data is used to
help with that precision And in terms of how precise is that
then it's really and I am a question.
So far as I'm just this cover, I'll add a little bit to that.
We, NASA's requirement for this mission, weren't very
challenging for the very first landing on the moon.
I am has told us they believe they'll have accuracy in the
100m range, which is comfortable to the swim mix and from Japan,
but we're not really pushing that as a as a high priority
this mix and we'll have some future mix and which will
require at least 100m accuracy. Thank you all.
Let's go back to Kenneth. Sorry, Sue, do you have anything
to add? Oh that was me firstly.
And actually since we are talking about future missions
I'd like to add that with the laser lighter technology it is
possible to get these precisions to meters regime mentioned.
With the train related navigation that is looking at
the terrain features with the laser beam getting a very good
position knowledge and the navigation Doppler larger to
navigate to that location and and the scanning the train for
for known feature. Again upon landing we can get
down to meters type regime. When we did demonstrations here
in the past using larger technologies about a decade ago,
we would we got down to about 10 centimeters.
So. So this type of precision is
quite achievable. Thank you.
And just going back to the question about coordination with
the payload, this is an excellent question and it's
something that we've been working on for quite some years
with both our individual payload teams coordinated with Intuitive
machines. We have 6 payloads on board.
They have six additional commercial payloads on board as
well. So in the years leading up to
the operations, we ensure that we have what our requests are
for what our payloads need for operating to include and
machines and then we coordinate together with timeline tools.
NASA Ames has created a great playbook plan where we and they
have a timeline tool as well, where we put all of our plans
for when each of the payloads are operating so that we can see
a full coordination to infer that the payloads don't
interfere. And then as well, when payloads
can run in parallel that we maximize the amount of science
return by allowing payloads that can autonomously take data,
continue taking data while other payloads need to have kind of a
step by step interacting with their payload to collect data
coming back. But this is all very well
coordinated and the plan has been in place for some time.
And so I expect that we're going to really maximize the science
return. Thank you so much all for
responding to that question. Let's go back to see Ken Chang
from the New York Times. Your line is now open.
Ken, can you hear us now? Yes.
Great. Thank you.
Sorry about. Passing up earlier.
I was wanting to ask about the landing site.
It was moved through the South polar.
Region and we've heard about wanting to learn about the
regulars in this area, but I was wondering what other.
Signs you might be able to get. From being here versus the
original. Landing site.
Thank you. That's an excellent question.
So this particular landing site is a very old terrain and so the
terrain is, if you for the geologists on board, it's more
of a standard philosophic kind of Highlands, and it's similar
to the Apollo 16 site. So it tells us a little bit more
about the original crustal materia from when the lunar
magma ocean cold and of course being beat up by impacts for
billions of years, covered up by the impact ejecta can allow some
of the material underneath to the surface.
So all of this information can help our scientists better
understand a little bit more about the the Highlands of the
moon and then be able to compare it to the Apollo 6 moon site
from the science side. Thank you.
Next up we have Leonard David, but the Scientific American
magazine. Leonard, your line is now open.
OK. Thank you for Michelle.
You know. Going to the South.
Pole we haven't been there. What kind of modeling?
Has been done about the dust that you may or may not run into
there and the other question. Would be for Dan on the LRA.
You know you've got slim. Has an LRA on it.
And the Indian spacecraft, so? Are those active?
Are you doing some? Experiments with lasers from
from LRO or. Or what's the status there?
Thank you. Hi, Leonard, this is Michelle.
Thanks for the question. Yeah, we hope to learn quite a
bit about this new area. In terms of modeling, we have,
you know, the Lunar source book as our source of regular data
from Apollo. And of course there are some,
you know, unknowns in there about, you know, different
phenomenon, different characteristics of the regular
in regions that we haven't actually directly measured yet.
So you know, compaction and everything comes from the
scientific observations and so there's quite a bit of
uncertainty on different parameters that we would use in
a model to predict the amount of cratering or the amount of.
Regular. That's, you know, ejected from
under a Lander and how big the particles are and how far they
would go. So those are all the types of,
you know, effects that we're trying to capture.
We will not capture them all with scalps.
It's near. It's merely of, you know,
optical measurements of what the surface looks like.
After we land on future Landers, we hope to add more types of
instruments that can build upon scalps and measure the ejecta
itself, as well as effects on the Lander surfaces like the
Lander base. So those are future plans.
Our models are pretty immature, I'd say at this point.
Or unvalidated because we haven't measured these phenomena
directly before. What we really want to do to
understand this completely, you know it's going to vary with
each location somewhat and with each Lander size, mass engine
configuration. And so having that predictive
model that can span all of those different like cases is going to
be, you know, the key for really predicting what's going to
happen on future flights. So in order to get that we want
to make these in situ measurements at the moon like
with scouts and future payloads. We also want to conduct ground
testing where we can carefully control the parameters and
investigate you know a wide parameter how to get a dated
model. Thanks.
And this is Daniel Crimmins for LRA.
Thanks for the question. We are indeed continuing to
reign to the two LR as currently on the surface from the
Chandrayan 3 mission and the SLIM mission.
As you know, the SLIM Lander is is at a non optimal attitude for
how we plan to use LRA. But we do still think that we'll
be able to range to LRA in its current kind of off nominal
configuration. And the L, the orbit of LRO at
the moment allows us to attempt to range to each LRA about once
every two weeks or so. And so we will continue to do
this, you know, as long as LRO and the laser altimeter on board
is operational. And I'd encourage you to next
month at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, the LRAPI
Shout, Doctor Sally's son will be giving a presentation on the
ranging results to sound around 3:00 and we'll also update on
any results that happened essentially from January until
March. Thanks.
Thank you. Next up we have Alexandra.
What's from Nature Magazine. Alexandra, your line is now
open. Great.
Thanks very much My. Question is about.
Roses, so it's for Nat. Could you talk a little bit
about the sources of interference expected?
I mean that the Chinese had that Lander on the far side where
they were trying to do radio astronomy and got a lot of
interference from their Lander. What are you anticipating in
terms of interference, both from the Lander itself and then also
of course being on the near side instead of the far side?
Thank you for the question. For the near side, the main
inference is actually, as I mentioned, it's from the
terrestrial transmitters. And these are expected and have
been detected, you know, once or twice when the wind spacecraft
was closer to the moon. And these appear as the
horizontal lines in the, you know, daily Spectra we take and
therefore it's easy to identify these interferences and then
still subtract them out to get the real signal from for
example, the sun. So that is definitely, you know,
a a very horizontal state line. So it's easy to extract.
Now for the land that this is one of the things that we do not
know, we are going to characterize them.
So that is that is actually completely unknown at this
stage. Thanks for the question.
The next one is next line we have is Jim Siegel with NASA
Tech. Jim, your line is now open.
Oh, thank you for taking my question and good luck on this.
Particular mission I'm curious I.
Understand that there are about. 6 or.
Seven other clips missions that. Have been.
Planned. Or are on the books and I'm
wondering are they all going to go to?
The same location and are. They going to build.
On each other in terms of knowledge that is 1 build time
in the other and pose one or two of them, don't make it.
Is that going to danger? The timing on the on the art of
the street. Thank you.
OK. That's Chris Colbert.
I'll, I'll, I'll take that one. So yes, we have a number of
missions, I think we're up through nine scheduled to the
moon at this point. They are all going to a variety
of locations mostly driven by the science that we're trying to
achieve. You can't do the same science at
every spot in the moon. So the objectives of the
payloads tend to drive where we take them.
We are having a number of missions that go to the South
Pole because of course that's of high interest to future human
exploration and there is complementary science across the
missions. As we learn things from 1
mission, we'll be able to help calibrate and prepare for future
missions more effectively. So we are certainly doing some
of that, but none of our missions are directly linked to
Artemis 3 or the planning part of three.
The data we gather will help agency plan better for all
people Artemis making. But if we lose one or two, which
is what this was was intended, or we knew could happen, it
won't endanger the Artemis mission with the Artemis.
Planning. Thank you, Chris.
Our next question comes from Will Robinson Smith from
Spaceflight Now Will. Your line is now open.
Yes, hi. Thanks for taking another
question from us. Follow up, if I may, to Bill
Harwood's question from a little bit earlier to Chris Colbert,
Can you provide a little bit more detail regarding the WDRS
and how they performed, if there were any leaks that came up or
any other issues? And another quick follow up,
what are the T0 liftoff options for the backup windows on the
15th and 16th? Thanks.
So on the wet dress rehearsals, you probably have to ask basics
about that. SpaceX and two machine actually
ran those we those aren't NASA function.
Sorry we missed the second part. What was your second question?
Well. Just if you have the T0 for the
backup dates on the 50s and 60s. Actually, I don't have those
handy. We think that'll be coming out
and something later on this week, but I don't have them
handy with me right now. So with regards to launch
windows and and timings, we we recommend that you reach out to
the launch provider, so in this case SpaceX for responses on T
minus. Zero for the other launch
opportunities. So thanks to all who submitted
questions today and thanks to our briefers for taking the time
to discuss NASA's CLIPS initiative and their payloads
aboard Intuitive Machines is IM 1 mission.
As a reminder, SpaceX is targeting no earlier than 12:57
AM Eastern on Wednesday, February 14th for a Falcon 9
launch of Intuitive Machines first lunar Lander to the moon
surface. We appreciate you joining us.
A recording of this briefing will be available on
nasa.gov/clips.