PSI Senior Scientist Matthew Siegler is part of the first Canadian rover mission that will explore the Moon and help in the international search for water ice, a key component needed for the future of human space exploration.
The rover will land on the south pole of the Moon and will carry five Canadian payloads, the Lunar Hydrogen Autonomous Neutron Spectrometer (LHANS), Radiation Micro-Dosimeter, and the Frozen Regolith Observation and Science Tools (FROST) imaging suite encompassing three payloads: Lyman-Alpha Imager; Multi-Spectral Imager (MSI); and MSI-Macro (MSI-M), and one from the U.S.
“I am making thermal models of what we would expect to see and mapping potential ice distributions in the polar cold traps this mission aims to visit,” Siegler said. “The mission is kind of a small version of NASA’s planned Viper lunar rover. It doesn’t have a drill, but it does have a suite of multi-wavelength cameras which will allow us to image into the shadowed regions of the Moon – something Viper can’t do.”
The 30-kilogram rover, designed and built by Canadensys Aerospace Corp. under a contract from the Government of Canada, could be sent to the Moon’s south pole region as early as 2026.