NASA's Lunar Thermal Mapper to find hotspots of lunar water

The instrument will collect temperature data

Engineers from the University of Oxford in England created LTM with funding from the UK Space Agency. In addition to LTM, another research instrument aboard the spacecraft is NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's High-resolution Volatiles and Minerals Moon Mapper (HVM3).

Pack it up, pack it in...NASA's @LunarTrailblazr gets its final payload!📦💼🧳

After the spacecraft's 2024 launch, its Lunar Thermal Mapper will work with an imaging spectrometer to help researchers understand the nature of water on the Moon’s surface.https://t.co/mNfDAbwa3G pic.twitter.com/S2Yi5Fp4IT

— Caltech IPAC (@caltechipac) August 16, 2023

The LTM instrument was specifically developed to acquire temperature data to investigate the lunar surface's thermal characteristics and the composition of silicate rocks and soils. 

While the HVM3 imaging spectrometer will be used to identify and map water's abundance and locations.

The two instruments will examine the same areas simultaneously from the orbit. “When Lunar Trailblazer arrives in orbit around the Moon, it will use HVM3 to map the spectral fingerprints – or wavelengths of reflected sunlight – of the different forms of water over the lunar landscape,” explained the release. 

Subsequently, LTM will scan those already mapped regions to create a detailed map that will enable scientists to deduce the temperature of the lunar surface. 

This information might be extremely useful in determining whether the amount of water at a specific site fluctuates at different times of the day.

“LTM 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. “Combining the measurements from both instruments allows us to understand how surface temperature affects water, improving our knowledge of the presence and distribution of these molecules on the Moon.”

This knowledge might be helpful to future explorers in myriad ways, including extracting and purifying water for drinking purposes and converting it into fuel and breathing oxygen.

Lunar Trailblazer mission

The Lunar Trailblazer weighs roughly 440 pounds (200 kilograms) with a height of 11.5 feet (3.5 meters) wide after deploying solar panels.  

The spacecraft is being finalized and tested at Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado. 

This project was chosen by NASA's SIMPLEx (Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration) program in 2019, and it will serve as a secondary payload on the second Intuitive Machines robotic lunar lander mission, IM-2. This mission is most likely to launch in early 2024.