Today, with its ambitious Artemis campaign, the iconic space agency has set its sights on returning humans to the lunar surface for the first time in more than 50 years.
And like the flights that preceded and helped make Apollo 11 possible, a multitude of scientific missions to the moon are now underway to help ensure that humans will once again set foot on Earth's only natural satellite.
A University of Miami astrophysicist is part of a team of scientists who labored for years on one of the most technologically advanced of those endeavors: a telescope that will land on the moon and capture the first-ever global images of the magnetic field that shields Earth from solar radiation.
"The interaction of solar wind and the Earth's magnetic field drives geomagnetic disturbances and storms and is an important scientific phenomenon that has never been fully imaged and studied at the level this telescope is capable of," Massimiliano Galeazzi, professor and chair of the Department of Physics in the University's College of Arts and Sciences, said of the Lunar Environment heliospheric X-ray Imager, or LEXI.
Created by Boston University College of Engineering associate professor Brian Walsh, LEXI is now on its magical flight to the moon, hitching a ride on Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander, which launched atop a powerful SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Jan. 15 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
After 45 days of spaceflight, Blue Ghost will land on the near side of the moon near a volcanic feature called Mons Latreille within Mare Crisium. LEXI will then deploy and power up, directing its focus back toward Earth as it collects images of the X-rays emanating from the edges of Earth's vast magnetosphere.
A vast, comet-shaped bubble, Earth's magnetosphere played a crucial role in our planet's habitability. Life on Earth initially developed and continues to be sustained under the protection of this magnetic environment.
"The view LEXI will give us will illustrate how this protective boundary is impacted by space weather," Galeazzi said. "Understanding space weather is vital because it affects our space infrastructure-from satellites to the performance of our ground equipment."
Space weather, according to NASA, can also pose hazards for Artemis astronauts traveling to the moon. And that's why LEXI is a priority for the agency. "This mission embodies the bold spirit of NASA's Artemis campaign-a campaign driven by scientific exploration and discovery," said NASA deputy administrator Pam Melroy. "Each flight we're part of is a vital step in the larger blueprint to establish a responsible, sustained human presence at the moon, Mars, and beyond."
Galeazzi has worked on LEXI almost since the project's inception, consulting with Boston University lead researchers on its design. The instrument is based on a telescope that launched in 2012 aboard a sounding rocket Galeazzi developed. "That instrument was the first one to demonstrate the performance of the optics used, called lobster-eye optics, in space," he said.
"One of the main issues we encountered and that I helped address was translating an instrument developed for a rocket to one based on the moon," he said. "Specifically, one of the challenges LEXI faces is observing the area of the sky between the Earth and the sun without being blinded by their emission. So, it required a carefully designed Earth and sun shield."
Scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Johns Hopkins University also worked on the project.
LEXI is actually one of 10 payloads aboard the Blue Ghost lunar lander as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative.
Other instruments will characterize the structure and composition of the moon's mantle by measuring electric and magnetic fields, collect regolith samples from the lunar surface using a burst of compressed gas, measure heat flow from the moon's interior, and characterize the structure and composition of the moon's mantle by measuring electric and magnetic fields.
The solar-powered Blue Ghost is scheduled for a soft touchdown on the lunar surface on March 2 and will operate for one lunar day, or roughly two Earth weeks, before shutting down permanently a few hours after the sun sets at its location.
Galeazzi traveled to Kennedy Space Center to witness the lander's launch. "It was amazing," he said. "I have seen multiple launches but knowing that this one carried an instrument with my contribution-and my name etched on it-to the moon was special."
His work on the LEXI telescope, he said, dovetails perfectly with his field of study-the construction of X-ray detectors for space.
"X-rays offer a unique perspective on multiple objects in outer space that cannot be obtained at other wavelengths," Galeazzi said. "It is important to build high-definition telescopes at X-ray wavelength to gather significant insight on multiple phenomena such as black holes and supernova explosions. But since X-rays do not penetrate Earth's atmosphere, the telescopes need to be launched into space, which makes things much more complicated.
"I'm an experimentalist," continued Galeazzi, who trained as a particle physicist in Italy and came to the U.S. as a postdoc to work on NASA rockets. "It was an opportunity I couldn't pass up. I like to build things in addition to studying astrophysics, and my current work is the best opportunity to do both."
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