The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said on 1 July that it has selected 12 new science and technology “payloads” that it expects to help it study the Moon and explore more of its surface as part of the agency’s Artemis lunar program.

The selected investigations and demonstrations are expected to help the agency to send astronauts to the Moon by 2024 as a way to prepare to send humans to Mars for the first times.

They will go to the Moon on future flights through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) project which allows “rapid acquisition of lunar delivery services” for things that “advance capabilities for science, exploration, or commercial development of the Moon”.

According to NASA, many of the new selections incorporate existing hardware designed for missions that have already flow. Seven of the investigations are focused on answering questions in planetary science or “heliophysics” – the study of the effects of the Sun on our solar system – and five will “demonstrate new technologies”.

NASA’s plans for lunar exploration are based on a two-phase approach, focusing first on speed – landing astronauts on the Moon by 2024 – and then on establishing a “sustained human presence” on the Moon by 2028.

“The selected lunar payloads represent cutting-edge innovations, and will take advantage of early flights through our commercial services project,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in a statement.

“Each demonstrates either a new science instrument or a technological innovation that supports scientific and human exploration objectives, and many have broader applications for Mars and beyond,” he added.

Here are just a few of the selected investigations:

MoonRanger

This small, fast-moving rover can drive beyond communications range with a lander and then return to it, allowing investigations that stretch within one kilometre of a lander. MoonRanger will aim to continually map the terrain it traverses and transmit data for future improvements to its systems.

The principle investigator on this project is: Andrew Horchler of Astrobotic Technology, Inc., Pittsburgh.

Heimdall

Sharing a name with the Norse god and guardian of Asgard, Heimdall is a flexible camera system built for conducting lunar science using commercial vehicles. It will use a single digital video recorder and four camera to model the properties of the Moon’s “regolith” – the soil and other material that makes up the top layer of the lunar surface – and “characterize and map geologic features” as well as potential landing or “trafficability” hazards, among other goals.

The principle investigator on this project is: R. Aileen Yingst of the Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Arizona.

The Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder

Using a flight-spare magnetometer – a device that measures magnetic fields – the Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder is designed to characterize the structure and composition of the Moon’s mantle by studying electric and magnetic fields. The magnetometer in questions was originally made for the MAVEN spacecraft, which is currently orbiting Mars.

The principle investigator on this project is: Robert Grimm of the Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio.

PlanetVac

PlanetVac is a technology for acquiring and transferring lunar regolith from the surface to other instruments that would analyse the material or put it in a container that another spacecraft could return to Earth.

The principal investigator on this project is: Kris Zacny of Honeybee Robotics, Ltd., Pasadena, California.

SAMPLR: Sample Acquisition, Morphology Filtering, and Probing of Lunar Regolith

SAMPLR is another sample acquisition technology that will make use of a robotic arm that is a flight spare from the Mars Exploration Rover mission, which included the long-lived rovers Spirit and Opportunity.

The principal investigator on this project is: Sean Dougherty of Maxar Technologies, Westminster, Colorado.

Peraton, a US defence and intelligence provider, said on 17 June it had entered into a “definitive agreement” to acquire Solers, a satellite ground systems and cloud-based services company, as part of an attempt to boost the company’s national security initiatives.

The company said that the acquisition would “accelerate both near- and long-range growth opportunities and enhance Peraton’s ability to deliver highly differentiated space protection and resiliency solutions that directly support mission objectives and critical national security initiatives” but did not specify what this would mean in practice.

The combined capabilities would enable Peraton to “expand its offerings of innovative and agile end-to-end solutions that address the growing complexity of customer mission needs across both national security and civilian agency space & ground programs”, Peraton said.

In a statement, Peraton chairman, president and CEO Stu Shea said that the acquisition represented “an important step” for the company and that it would “significantly enhance” its ability to serve customers on “critical missions” by bringing together “some of the most proven and innovative space protection and ground operations technologies in the industry”.

“I’m excited to welcome the talented Solers team to Peraton, strengthening our already robust space portfolio, technical excellence and rapid innovation capabilities,” he added.

David Kellogg, president and CEO of Solers, described the partnership as “truly a strategic fit” and expressed his “full confidence” that the companies would continue to offer “high quality support” to their government clients.

 “Through our combination with Peraton – a company with whom we have many shared values – our customers will have access to some of the best people and technologies available to address their critical missions and our employees will benefit from greatly expanded growth opportunities as part of this new company,” he concluded.

“Peraton’s transformational acquisition of Solers will accelerate the company’s presence in the high-priority, emerging space and communications markets,” Ramzi Musallam, CEO and Managing Partner of Veritas Capital, which owns Peraton, said. “This combination will create a differentiated platform, strengthening Peraton’s ability to provide mission-critical services and solutions to its dynamic customer base.”

Investment bank KippsDeSanto acted as the financial advisor to Solers and Macquarie Capital acted as financial advisor to Peraton for the deal.

Engineers from the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recently visited lava tubes in the North East of California to test a rover that could be used to search for underground life on other planet, the agency said on 26 June.

Scientists predict that there are caves – known as lava tubes – beneath the surfaces of the Moon, Mars and Venus that are formed by flowing magma and covered in tiny crystals, and which could potentially host living organisms.

These lava tubes can stretch for miles. On other planets with less gravity, some caves could even be large enough to fit small cities. For places like Mars too dry for life and with atmospheres too thin to block dangerous space radiation, lava tubes could safely harbor potential life.

Beyond helping us pinpoint the best spots to search for life, these caves could bring us one step closer to a permanent presence on the Moon and safe exploration at Mars – the ultimate goal of NASA’s Artemis program.

On Earth, similar caves are home to complex ecosystems, all supported by microbes that “eat” rocks, converting them into energy for life. The scientists of the BRAILLE project believe such life could exist – or have once existed – in the caves of Mars as well.

Operated out of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, the Biologic and Resource Analog Investigations in Low Light Environments (BRAILLE) team is developing the capability to detect life on the walls of volcanic caves from afar by venturing into North America’s largest network of lava tubes, with the goal of advancing efforts to search for life elsewhere in the universe.

Already, data from the team’s first field deployment is helping scientists understand the interactions between biology and geology in these volcanic caves. New science from the project will be presented this week at the Astrobiology Science Conference in Seattle.

“We don’t think there’s life to find on the Moon now, but some day the life on the Moon might be us,” Jennifer Blank, the principal investigator for the BRAILLE project, said in a statement. “And if I were going to the Moon, I’d want to go to a lava tube.”

“Orbital satellite data suggests that there are a lot of these lava tubes on Mars,” she added. “If there is life there, those tubes are a good place to look. And if there was life in Mars’ ancient past, that’s where it’s most likely to be preserved.”

The BRAILLE team made its first descent at Valentine Cave, one of over 750 at the Lava Beds National Monument in California, close to the state’s northern border. According to NASA, smooth walls around 15 feet high and walkways up to 70 feet wide make it a practical place to drive a rover, and its well preserved lava flow features are similar to what the agency expects to find inside Martian lava caves.

With the right lighting, the cave’s layers of microbial material and mineral deposits create a dazzling array of colors but NASA’s cave rover – CaveR – can do even more with its scientific cameras and imaging tools.

These instruments take in small amounts of light that reflect off the cave wall’s surface, allowing scientists to identify chemical components that reveal signs of life. The rover also uses a laser scanner to map the subterranean caves.

BRAILLE’s three-week deployment involved sample collection from nine different caves, tackling scientific questions ranging from geochemistry to DNA sequencing. One result of this study is a working theory that the team calls the “Micro-Mineral Continuum,” describing how past and present microbial life appears in the caves.

Between two endpoints on this spectrum – from the walls being visibly bare rock to coated with colored films of microscopic life – are a range of different features, textures and secondary minerals created by the interactions of those microbes with the basaltic rock and water that drips down into the caves.

By studying the continuum further in future returns to Lava Beds and understanding the interplay between geology and biology in these caves, scientists will be able to know what they’re looking at when we one day send rovers to Martian caves.

Scientists at the Rochester Institute of Technology will use a grant from the New York State Department of Environmental Conversation (DEC) to identify and map five invasive plant species around New York State, the university said on 20 June.

Instead of using traditional methods of data collection, the two faculty members plan to train an artificial intelligence (AI) to recognise the plants in images from Google Street View and other sources, allowing officials to identify high-priority treatment sites, identifying where the species have spread and subsequently prioritising where to intervene.

Invasive plants can quickly damage ecosystems, cause economic hardships for farmers and pose health risks to the public, but regulators tasked with halting their progress often have limited resources.

The two researchers, Assistant Professor Christopher Kanan and Associate Professor Christy Tyler, believe that this new approach will be “a big improvement over current tracking methods, which rely on field reports and volunteer crowd-sourcing”.

“There are limitations to crowd-sourcing,” Kanan said in a statement. “Rural roads are hard to get to and hard to monitor and often you can’t even pull over to the side of the road easily.”

“If we can figure out where these species are, using artificial intelligence, organizations like the Department of Environmental Conservation can better allocate their resources toward managing these plants,” he added.

Kanan and Tyler have already identified working models for two species – common reed (Phragmites) and Japanese knotweed—which they will further fine-tune, the university said. They will also develop new models for identifying giant hogweed, tree-of-heaven and purple loosestrife.

These plants are some of the most problematic species in New York because they quickly crowd out native plants, are hazardous to humans or host insects that wreak havoc on crops.

“We started with two target species that are pretty obvious, noxious, public enemy number one-type species that are common on roadways,” Tyler explained. “We picked them because they are priority species and distinctive looking plants that can be picked up easily by computers.”

“Moving forward, tree-of-heaven is an important one because it’s the host of the spotted lantern fly, a new invasive insect that has huge potential for crop damage, especially tree fruit including apples, pears, peaches and grapes. That will be a bigger challenge because it looks a lot like other species,” she said.

Once the computer models are functional and begin making predications about where the invasive species are located, Tyler’s environmental science students can verify the identification in the images and in the field to confirm that the algorithm works.

Students in the environmental science senior capstone class, with Visiting Assistant Professor Kaitlin Stack Whitney, have already helped with this verification process. Ultimately, the results will be communicated to managers through the New York State Partnership for Invasive Species Management (PRISM).

“Most of the big successes in computer vision use deep neural networks with images that are fairly small. Google Street View images have over 1,000 times more pixels . . . images typically used. Standard algorithms totally break down in this situation,” the researchers said. “

We have developed efficient methods for detecting regions of these high-resolution images that are likely to contain plant matter and then we determine if an invasive plant is present in the scene,” they concluded. “For needle in the haystack type problems, this multi-stage process seems to be very successful.”

The project is funded by the DEC’s Invasive Species Grant Program, which is designed to “support projects that target both aquatic and terrestrial invasive species”. The DEC received 96 applications and awarded approximately US$2.8 million from the New York State Environmental Protection Fund to 42 projects.