NASA is working to establish wireless communication on the Moon!

NASA's LunarLites project at Glenn Research Center in Ohio examined whether 4G and 5G technologies on Earth could be transferred to the lunar surface, and inspired two new projects now under way.

The Lunar Surface Propagation (LSP) project examines the performance of wireless communication systems on the lunar surface.

NASA's LSP principal investigator Michael Zemba said, "All of the Apollo missions landed near the Moon's mid-latitudes and generally on flat lava plains. But for the Artemis campaign, our focus is exploring the Moon's polar regions".

NASA's Artemis program aims to place astronauts in lunar orbit in 2025 and carry out a crewed landing one year later.

Zemba added, "The extreme locations at the South Pole could create challenges in deploying wireless networks such as Wi-Fi and 5G, so having accurate and reliable models and simulation tools is critically important. Fundamentally, it is the same idea as choosing a suitable location for your wireless router at home, but with craters larger than Manhattan".

NASA's Desert Research and Technology Studies (Desert Rats) team revisited a desert site in Arizona as part of its simulations in 2022. These field tests, once used to prepare for the Apollo missions, enabled the agency to compare theoretical knowledge with real data on Earth. However, after taking the Moon's immediate environment into account, it emerged that the geometry of the Moon's orbit around Earth introduced additional complexities.

Lunar 3GPP project principal investigator Raymond Wagner said, "There are a number of fundamental challenges to making wireless systems work on the lunar surface". Wagner said, "Extreme temperatures and the radiation environment alone can cause all kinds of problems for commercial-grade electronics. 4G and 5G systems are computationally complex, and hardening them for the lunar surface is no small undertaking".

News Source: 12punto