{"id":149109,"date":"2022-10-29T18:24:59","date_gmt":"2022-10-29T23:24:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/nasas-lunar-flashlight-ready-to-search-for-the-moons-water-ice"},"modified":"2022-10-29T18:24:59","modified_gmt":"2022-10-29T23:24:59","slug":"nasas-lunar-flashlight-ready-to-search-for-the-moons-water-ice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/nasas-lunar-flashlight-ready-to-search-for-the-moons-water-ice","title":{"rendered":"NASA\u2019s Lunar Flashlight ready to search for the Moon\u2019s water ice"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/nasas-lunar-flashlight-ready-to-search-for-the-moons-water-ice2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s known that water ice exists below the lunar regolith (broken rock and dust), but scientists don\u2019t yet understand whether surface ice frost covers the floors inside these cold craters. To find out, NASA is sending Lunar Flashlight, a small satellite (or SmallSat) no larger than a briefcase. Swooping low over the lunar South Pole, it will use lasers to shed light on these dark craters\u2014much like a prospector looking for hidden treasure by shining a flashlight into a cave. The mission will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in mid-November.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis launch will put the satellite on a trajectory that will take about three months to reach its science <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/orbit\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">orbit<\/a>,\u201d said John Baker, the mission\u2019s project manager at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. \u201cThen Lunar Flashlight will try to find <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/water+ice\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">water ice<\/a> on the surface of the Moon in places that nobody else has been able to look.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It\u2019s known that water ice exists below the lunar regolith (broken rock and dust), but scientists don\u2019t yet understand whether surface ice frost covers the floors inside these cold craters. To find out, NASA is sending Lunar Flashlight, a small satellite (or SmallSat) no larger than a briefcase. Swooping low over the lunar South Pole, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2028],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-satellites"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149109\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}