Members from NASA and Italian Space Agency watching the Blue Ghost lunar lander touch down on the Moon. (Photo: NASA )
During a public workshop at the Italian Space Agency on Oct. 14-15, the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) project team celebrated the closure of the project and released the data collected to the scientific community.
LuGRE, developed in partnership by NASA and the Italian Space Agency (ASI), flew to the Moon a GNSS receiver manufactured by the Italian company Qascom. The receiver was hosted aboard the Firefly BGM1 mission.
LuGRE demonstrated that signals from GNSS satellite constellations can also be used for positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) on the Moon.
The Navigation Signal Analysis and Simulation of the Dept. of Electroncis and Telecommunications of Polytechnic University of Turin processed the data received during the mission and contributed to all the science team activities, including the validation of the data and the processing of the initial set of scientific results.
The full set of data collected during the space mission, which took place between Jan. 16 and March 16, is now available.
An artist’s concept of the LuGRE payload on Blue Ghost and its three main records in transit to the Moon, in lunar orbit and on the Moon’s surface. (Image: NASA/Dave Ryan)
Launched on Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander in January, LuGRE became the first payload to use Earth’s GNSS to calculate a navigation fix on the lunar surface and in lunar orbit. The experiment set a series of distance records on its journey to the Moon, demonstrating that GNSS technology can complement other navigation tools as far as 247,520 miles (398,350 km) from Earth.
These results point to a future where lunar astronauts, rovers and spacecraft can rely on the same satellite-based navigation systems we use every day to augment their navigation capabilities.
“It is a very important milestone for the satellite navigation community,” said Fabio Dovis, Politecnico di Torino, Italian Space Agency, of the project. “For the first time we have the recording of signal of the GPS and Galileo constellation collected in space and on the Moon surface. Already during the LuGRE mission we proved the feasibility of using satellite systems originally designed to be used on Earth up to lunar distances. Now the entire scientific community can use them to ‘re-play’ the space environment as well as analyze them in depth, for example, to retrieve information about the Earth atmosphere crossed by the signal themselves.”
Artistic rendering of LuGRE and the GNSS constellations. In reality, the Earth-based GNSS constellations take up less than 10 degrees in the sky, as seen from the Moon. (Image: NASA/Dave Ryan)
The data release includes the actual GPS and Galileo radio signals LuGRE captured during its journey and on the lunar surface. The raw recordings — called in-phase and quadrature (I/Q) samples — allow researchers to analyze GNSS signal strength, noise and interference under lunar conditions for the first time. Engineers and scientists will use these results to model and refine the next generation of GNSS-based signal receivers and improve our understanding of how navigation signals operate at the Moon.
Graphic representation of the relative geometry of Earth-Moon-acquired GNSS satellites. (Image: Agenzia Sapaziale Italiana)
Members from NASA and Italian Space Agency watching the Blue Ghost lunar lander touch down on the Moon. (Photo: NASA ) 
