Launching next year, Lunar Trailblazer will circle the Moon to create a high-resolution map of its surface water, determining water's exact abundance, location, forms, and changes over time. Managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and led by Caltech, this small satellite mission will provide critical insights to help advance lunar science and support future lunar exploration efforts.

"Making high-resolution measurements of the type and amount of lunar water will help us understand the lunar water cycle, and it will provide clues to other questions, like how and when did Earth get its water," said Bethany Ehlmann, principal investigator for Lunar Trailblazer at Caltech. "But understanding the inventory of lunar water is also important if we are to establish a sustained human and robotic presence on the Moon and beyond."

The data could aid future lunar explorers by showing how water resources on the Moon might be used, such as processing lunar ice to produce breathable oxygen or even fuel. Additionally, the information could enable scientific investigations to analyze the origin of lunar water, for example, by determining if it arrived via comets or from the Moon's volcanic history based on the chemical composition of ice.

"In the future, scientists could analyze the ice in the interiors of permanently shadowed craters to learn more about the origins of water on the Moon," said Rachel Klima, Lunar Trailblazer deputy principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. "Like an ice core from a glacier on Earth can reveal the ancient history of our planet's atmospheric composition, this pristine lunar ice could provide clues as to where that water came from and how and when it got there."

Lunar Trailblazer will also investigate the movement of water on the Moon, examining whether it is locked in minerals or migrates across the lunar surface in cycles. On the Moon, water could migrate from extremely cold "cold traps" to other areas throughout the day, forming frost or evaporating and redepositing in different cold regions. Insights into this dynamic could provide clues about water cycles on other airless bodies, such as asteroids.

The mission features two main instruments: the High-resolution Volatiles and Minerals Moon Mapper (HVM3) infrared spectrometer and the Lunar Thermal Mapper (LTM) infrared multispectral imager. Developed by JPL, the HVM3 will capture the spectral fingerprints of lunar minerals and water, even in shadowed craters, while the LTM, funded by the UK Space Agency and built by the University of Oxford, will map mineral content and surface temperatures.

"The LTM instrument precisely maps the surface temperature of the Moon while the HVM3 instrument looks for the spectral signature of water molecules," said Neil Bowles, instrument scientist for LTM at the University of Oxford. "Both instruments will allow us to understand how surface temperature affects water, improving our knowledge of the presence and distribution of these molecules on the Moon."

Compact and efficient, the 440-pound (200-kilogram) satellite, with solar panels extending its width to 11.5 feet (3.5 meters), will orbit the Moon at an altitude of 60 miles (100 kilometers). Selected in 2019 by NASA's SIMPLEx program, Lunar Trailblazer is set to launch alongside Intuitive Machines-2 under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. After completing testing at Lockheed Martin Space, the orbiter is now undergoing final software and mission simulation checks to ensure readiness for its lunar journey. The operations team, led by IPAC at Caltech, is also testing communications and navigation using NASA's Deep Space Network.

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