The Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Explorer at Night (LuSEE-Night) is a funded, joint project between NASA and DOE that is anticipated to launch at the end of 2025. It aims to make sensitive measurements across two decades in frequency between ~0.5 MHz and ~50 MHz from the radio-quiet far side of the moon. LuSEE-Night will search for the cosmological 21 cm signal from the Dark Ages as well as study solar winds and low frequency plasma astrophysics. The mission will demonstrate the feasibility of conducting radio-frequency astronomy from the far side of the moon and acts as a pathfinder for larger missions in the future. LuSEE-Night will deploy four orthogonal 3-meter monopole antennas sensitive to both linear polarizations simultaneously that will be mounted on a turntable with +/- 90° range. The performance and sensitivity of the antennas are critical aspects to making the project a success. This talk will delve into the design, modeling, and testing of the antenna module. We will describe the design choices that were made to balance science, reliability, and feasibility of the project while taking constraints imposed by a space mission into account.
LuSEE Night is a low frequency radio astronomy experiment that will be delivered to the farside of the Moon by the NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program in early 2026. LuSEE Night is designed to characterize the galactic radio foreground with best-yet sensitivity and depth but will also measure solar, planetary, and other astrophysical sources. The payload system under contract and being developed jointly by NASA and the US Department of Energy (DOE) and consists of a 4 channel, 50 MHz Nyquist baseband receiver system and 2 orthogonal ~6m tip-to-tip electric dipole antennas. LuSEE Night will enjoy standalone operations through the lunar night, without the electromagnetic interference (EMI) of an operating lander system and antipodal to our noisy home planet. LuSEE Night will also be supported by a NASA-funded far-field calibration source, in the form of a lunar-orbiting radio transmitter that broadcasts a pseudo-random code sequence; LuSEE Night will correlate against the code and use the signal to calibrate antenna pattern and system spectral chromaticity.
The Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment at Night (LuSEE-Night) is a project designed to investigate the feasibility of observing the Cosmic Dark Ages using an instrument on the lunar far-side. LuSEE-Night will measure the redshifted 21 cm transition of neutral hydrogen over a frequency range of 0.1-50 MHz, covering the redshift range 27 < z < 1100. The LuSEE-Night instrument is a radio frequency spectrometer, consisting of four horizontal monopole antennas, arranged to give wide zenith-pointing beams with two orthogonal linear polarizations. This combination of polarization, spectral, and angular sensitivity will be necessary to separate the cosmological signal from significantly stronger foreground emissions. LuSEE-Night will observe in drift scan during lunar night while the moon shields it from radio frequency interference from both the Earth and sun, and will transmit science and telemetry data back to Earth via an orbital relay during the lunar day. LuSEENight will have to operate in a challenging environment: its electronics must operate under hard radiation, the instrument must be thermally isolated during the cold 100 K lunar night, and have a thermal rejection path to survive the 390 K daytime temperature, and its photovoltaic and battery systems must provide sufficient power to operate during two weeks of lunar night. Furthermore, the instrument spectrometer must be powered throughout the lunar night using only a 7 kWh battery, due to mass limitations. Here we describe the power generation, storage, and delivery subsystems of the LuSEE-Night instrument, and the simulations of expected power generation, draw, and reserves over time which were performed in order to design the power subsystems, and ensure instrument survival and operation throughout the long lunar night. We also describe the Concept of Operations (ConOps) developed for the LuSEE-Night mission, which derives from the power management simulations.
The Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment - Night, LuSEE-Night, is a low-frequency radio astronomy experiment that will explore the cosmic Dark Ages signal on the radio-quiet far side of the Moon. The LuSEE-Night carries a radio frequency spectrometer consisting of a set of antennas, analog and digital processing electronics, and will be launched by NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services in 2025. The spectrometer is designed to observe the spectrum of the radio sky in the 0.5−50MHz band. The flight model (FM) of the four-channel spectrometer has been developed. The FM has been characterized for linearity, gain, noise, and their temperature dependence, confirming that the FM meets all the requirements for LuSEE-Night.
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