NASA uses GPS on the Moon for the first time

 Demonstrating that ground-based GPS can work on the Moon with the LuGRE instrument onboard the Blue Ghost lander could change lunar exploration

Hardly anyone gets lost on Earth anymore. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a technology we use every day to locate ourselves using signals sent from satellites. However, since the Moon is about 385,000 kilometers away, these signals are significantly weakened. To overcome this challenge, scientists have developed systems like LuGRE, which can capture and analyze satellite navigation signals in deep space. This advance is key to lunar exploration, as it will allow astronauts to orient themselves more autonomously without relying solely on communications with Earth.

On March 2, the company Firefly Aerospace made history with the successful landing of the Blue Ghost lunar lander on the surface of the Moon. But the mission didn’t stop at touching down: just a few days later, it achieved an unprecedented milestone by capturing ground-based GPS signals on the Moon, marking a critical advance for autonomous navigation on future crewed Artemis missions.

For astronauts who one day explore the Moon, knowing their precise position will be crucial. But traditional GPS, which works perfectly on Earth, isn’t useful 240,000 miles away. One possible solution is to harness Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals and transmit them to the lunar surface to autonomously calculate location, speed and time. That’s precisely what engineers at NASA and the Italian Space Agency sought to demonstrate with the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE), one of ten instruments carried by Blue Ghost.

But LuGRE’s success began even before landing. During its journey, the instrument broke a NASA record on January 21 by picking up a GNSS signal 338,000 kilometers from Earth, the greatest distance ever reached. And it didn’t stop there: the record was further surpassed until reaching 391,000 kilometers on February 20, when the spacecraft reached lunar orbit.

No need to navigate from Earth anymore

Until now, NASA has tracked its spacecraft with a combination of onboard sensors and tracking signals from Earth, requiring constant intervention by teams of engineers. Integrating GNSS data could reduce this dependency, allowing spacecraft to pick up these signals autonomously and reduce the need for real-time monitoring from Earth.

“On Earth, we can use GNSS signals to navigate with everything from smartphones to airplanes,” explained Kevin Coggins, deputy assistant administrator for NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program. “Now, LuGRE shows us that we can successfully acquire and track GNSS signals on the Moon.”

The LuGRE system relied on two GNSS constellations: the American GPS and Galileo, the European system. Both operate with satellites in medium Earth orbits that provide real-time location data. LuGRE achieved its first lunar navigation measurement on March 3 at 2 a.m. (US Eastern Time), when it was about 385,000 kilometers from Earth.

Over the next two weeks, LuGRE will continue collecting data almost continuously while Blue Ghost’s other instruments begin their own experiments. If this system succeeds in proving that ground-based GPS can be a reliable tool on the Moon, future missions could integrate GNSS receivers into their navigation systems, facilitating autonomous exploration and reducing the workload for teams on Earth.

This achievement is just a first step in creating interplanetary navigation systems, which could one day be used not only on the Moon, but also on Mars and beyond.