Suggested Searches

Small Satellite Missions

Science Public Affairs Officer, NASA Langley Research Center

Categories

NASA’s Arcstone Instrument Successfully Completes Primary Mission 

NASA’s Arcstone instrument, designed to improve the accuracy of lunar calibration, successfully completed its technology demonstration, and now begins extended operations.  

Arcstone launched on June 23 on a SpaceX Transporter-14 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, on a six-month mission to measure light reflected by the Moon, which is a stable and potentially highly-accurate calibration source, for satellite sensors. 

The mission, led by NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, uses a specially designed spectrometer system and is the first on-orbit instrument solely dedicated to improving the accuracy of lunar calibration. Measurements of sunlight reflected off the Moon are the first step in creating a new lunar model for the calibration of Earth-orbiting sensors — including those that map the surface of the Earth for commercial, scientific, and consumer use, such as the maps on cellphones.

A satellite
An artist’s rendering of NASA’s Arcstone instrument on-orbit gathering measurements of lunar reflectance by sequentially observing the Moon and Sun.
Blue Canyon Technologies

“Since Arcstone is gathering measurements in space, the data it collects does not contain atmospheric effects that increase error, and operations are not dependent on having good weather,” said Cindy Young, principal investigator for the mission. “This helps us acquire consistent and frequent lunar sampling.”

Young added that Arcstone has already collected more than 240 lunar observations and has successfully demonstrated the measurement concept on-orbit.

Two graphs, one above the other. Both graphs have two lines, one red and one blue, that travel from left to right. The x axis on both graphs represents the wavelength of light. In the top graph, the y-axis represents sensor signal. In the top graph, the red line starts higher than the blue, but around the 850 wavelength point, the blue travels higher than the red. In the bottom graph, the y-axis represents lunar reflectance. Both lines start lower on the y-axis and travel upward, the blue above the red the entire time.
Arcstone observes light from the Sun and Moon sequentially using the same optical system. The Sun is viewed for a much shorter time because of its brightness. The top panel illustrates the instrument’s signals for the Sun and the Moon which are both needed to calculate lunar reflectance. The bottom panel shows Arcstone’s measurement of the Moon’s reflectance compared to the data from the Robotic Lunar Observatory (ROLO) model, which is a well-known model scientists currently use to predict the Moon’s brightness from ground-based lunar data.
NASA

Next steps for the science team include processing and validating the raw data to assess accuracy.   

The Arcstone technology demonstration is a low-cost mission funded by NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office’s In-space Validation of Earth Science Technologies Program. Partners include the University of Colorado Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, the U.S. Geological Survey, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, Resonon Inc., Blue Canyon Technologies, and Quartus Engineering. 

 For more information on NASA’s Arcstone mission, visit: 

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/arcstone/

Science Public Affairs Officer, NASA Langley Research Center