Building a Lunar Network: Johnson Tests Wireless Technologies for the Moon
2 Min Read
Building a Lunar Network: Johnson Tests Wireless Technologies for the Moon
From left, Johnson Exploration Wireless Laboratory (JEWL) Software Lead William Dell; Lunar 3GPP Principal Investigator Raymond Wagner; JEWL intern Harlan Phillips; and JEWL Lab Manager Chatwin Lansdowne.
Credits: Nevada Space Proving Grounds (NSPG)
NASA engineers are strapping on backpacks loaded with radios, cameras, and antennas to test technology that might someday keep explorers connected on the lunar surface. Their mission: test how astronauts on the Moon will stay connected during Artemis spacewalks using 3GPP (LTE/4G and 5G) and Wi-Fi technologies.
It’s exciting to bring lunar spacewalks into the 21st century with the immersive, high-definition experience that will make people feel like they’re right there with the astronauts.
Raymond Wagner
NASA’s Lunar 3GPP Project Principal Investigator
A NASA engineer tests a backpack-mounted wireless communications system in the Nevada desert, simulating how astronauts will stay connected during Artemis lunar spacewalks.
NSPG
With Artemis, NASA will establish a long-term presence at the Moon, opening more of the lunar surface to exploration than ever before. This growth of lunar activity will require astronauts to communicate seamlessly with each other and with science teams back on Earth.
“We’re working out what the software that uses these networks needs to look like,” said Raymond Wagner, principal investigator in NASA’s Lunar 3GPP project and member of Johnson Space Center’s Exploration Wireless Laboratory (JEWL) in Houston. “We’re prototyping it with commercial off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software to show what pieces are needed and how they interact.”
Carrying a prototype wireless network pack, a NASA engineer helps test wireless 4G and 5G technologies that could one day keep Artemis astronauts connected on the Moon.
NSPG
The next big step comes with Artemis III, which will land a crew on the Moon and carry a 4G/LTE demonstration to stream video and audio from the astronauts on the lunar surface.
The vision goes further. “Right now the lander or rover will host the network,” Wagner said. “But if we go to the Moon to stay, we may eventually want actual cell towers. The spacesuit itself is already becoming the astronaut’s cell phone, and rovers could act as mobile hotspots. Altogether, these will be the building blocks of communication on the Moon.”
Team members from NASA’s Avionics Systems Laboratory at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
NASA/Sumer Loggins
Back at Johnson, teams are simulating lunar spacewalks, streaming video, audio, and telemetry over a private 5G network to a mock mission control. The work helps engineers refine how future systems will perform in challenging environments. Craters, lunar regolith, and other terrain features all affect how radio signals travel — lessons that will also carry over to Mars.
For Wagner, the project is about shaping how humanity experiences the next era of exploration. “We’re aiming for true HD on the Moon,” he said. “It’s going to be pretty mind-blowing.”
New NASA Mission to Reveal Earth’s Invisible ‘Halo’
5 min read
New NASA Mission to Reveal Earth’s Invisible ‘Halo’
A new NASA mission will capture images of Earth’s invisible “halo,” the faint light given off by our planet’s outermost atmospheric layer, the exosphere, as it morphs and changes in response to the Sun. Understanding the physics of the exosphere is a key step toward forecasting dangerous conditions in near-Earth space, a requirement for protecting Artemis astronauts traveling through the region on the way to the Moon or on future trips to Mars. The Carruthers Geocorona Observatory will launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida no earlier than Tuesday, Sept. 23.
Revealing Earth’s invisible edge
In the early 1970s, scientists could only speculate about how far Earth’s atmosphere extended into space. The mystery was rooted in the exosphere, our atmosphere’s outermost layer, which begins some 300 miles up. Theorists conceived of it as a cloud of hydrogen atoms — the lightest element in existence — that had risen so high the atoms were actively escaping into space.
But the exosphere reveals itself only via a faint “halo” of ultraviolet light known as the geocorona. Pioneering scientist and engineer Dr. George Carruthers set himself the task of seeing it. After launching a few prototypes on test rockets, he developed an ultraviolet camera ready for a one-way trip to space.
Apollo 16 astronaut John Young is pictured on the lunar surface with George Carruthers’ gold-plated Far Ultraviolet Camera/Spectrograph, the first Moon-based observatory. The Lunar Module “Orion” is on the right and the Lunar Roving Vehicle is parked in the background next to the American flag.
NASA
In April 1972, Apollo 16 astronauts placed Carruthers’ camera on the Moon’s Descartes Highlands, and humanity got its firstglimpse of Earth’s geocorona. The images it produced were as stunning for what they captured as they were for what they didn’t.
“The camera wasn’t far enough away, being at the Moon, to get the entire field of view,” said Lara Waldrop, principal investigator for the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory. “And that was really shocking — that this light, fluffy cloud of hydrogen around the Earth could extend that far from the surface.” Waldrop leads the mission from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where George Carruthers was an alumnus.
The first image of UV light from Earth’s outer atmosphere, the geocorona, taken from a telescope designed and built by George Carruthers. The telescope took the image while on the Moon during the Apollo 16 mission in 1972.
G. Carruthers (NRL) et al./Far UV Camera/NASA/Apollo 16
Our planet, in a new light
Today, the exosphere is thought to stretch at least halfway to the Moon. But the reasons for studying go beyond curiosity about its size. As solar eruptions reach Earth, they hit the exosphere first, setting off a chain of reactions that sometimes culminate in dangerous space weather storms. Understanding the exosphere’s response is important to predicting and mitigating the effects of these storms. In addition, hydrogen — one of the atomic building blocks of water, or H2O — escapes through the exosphere. Mapping that escape process will shed light on why Earth retains water while other planets don’t, helping us find exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system, that might do the same. NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, named in honor of George Carruthers, is designed to capture the first continuous movies of Earth’s exosphere, revealing its full expanse and internal dynamics.
“We’ve never had a mission before that was dedicated to making exospheric observations,” said Alex Glocer, the Carruthers mission scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It’s really exciting that we’re going to get these measurements for the first time.”
At 531 pounds and roughly the size of a loveseat sofa, the Carruthers spacecraft will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket along with NASA’s IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe) spacecraft and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s SWFO-L1 (Space Weather Follow On – Lagrange 1) space weather satellite. After launch, all three missions will commence a four-month cruise phase to Lagrange point 1 (L1), a location approximately 1 million miles closer to the Sun than Earth is. After a one-month period for science checkouts, Carruthers’ two-year science phase will begin in March 2026.
Artist’s concept of the five Sun-Earth Lagrange points in space. At Lagrange points, the gravitational pull of two large masses counteract, allowing spacecraft to reduce fuel consumption needed to remain in position. The L1 point of the Earth-Sun system affords an uninterrupted view of the Sun and will be home to three new heliophysics missions in 2025: NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and NOAA’s Space Weather Follow-On – Lagrange 1 (SWFO – L1).
NASA’s Conceptual Image Lab/Krystofer Kim
From L1, roughly four times farther away than the Moon, Carruthers will capture a comprehensive view of the exosphere using two ultraviolet cameras, a near-field imager and a wide-field imager.
“The near-field imager lets you zoom up really close to see how the exosphere is varying close to the planet,” Glocer said. “The wide-field imager lets you see the full scope and expanse of the exosphere, and how it’s changing far away from the Earth’s surface.”
The two imagers will together map hydrogen atoms as they move through the exosphere and ultimately out to space. But what we learn about atmospheric escape on our home planet applies far beyond it.
“Understanding how that works at Earth will greatly inform our understanding of exoplanets and how quickly their atmospheres can escape,” Waldrop said.
By studying the physics of Earth, the one planet we know that supports life, the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory can help us know what to look for elsewhere in the universe.
The Carruthers Geocorona Observatory mission is led by Lara Waldrop from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley leads mission implementation, design and development of the payload in collaboration with Utah State University’s Space Dynamics Laboratory. The Carruthers spacecraft was designed and built by BAE Systems. NASA’s Explorers and Heliophysics Projects Division at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the mission for the agency’s Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
By Miles Hatfield NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
The Milky Way appears above Earth’s bright atmospheric glow in this Aug. 23, 2025, photograph from the International Space Station as it soared 261 miles above southern Iran at approximately 12:54 a.m. local time. The camera was configured for low light and long duration settings.
Cygnus XL Cargo Craft Installed on Station’s Unity Module
Sept. 18, 2025: International Space Station Configuration. Six spaceships are docked at the space station including the SpaceX Dragon cargo craft, the SpaceX Crew-11 Dragon spacecraft, Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus XL cargo craft, the Soyuz MS-27 crew ship, and the Progress 92 and 93 resupply ships.
NASA
Northrop Grumman’s new Cygnus XL spacecraft has been installed to the International Space Station. The mission is known as NASA’s Northrop Grumman Commercial Resupply Services 23, or Northrop Grumman CRS-23.
Filled with more than 11,000 pounds of research and supplies, the Northrop Grumman Cygnus XL spacecraft, carried on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, launched at 6:11 p.m. EDT on Sept. 14, from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. This mission will be the first flight of the Cygnus XL, the larger, more cargo-capable version of the company’s solar-powered spacecraft.
Cygnus will remain at the space station until spring when it departs the orbiting laboratory at which point it will dispose of several thousand pounds of debris through its re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere where it will harmlessly burn up.
Robotic Arm Maneuvering Cygnus for Station Installation
The Cygnus XL cargo craft is maneuvered by the Canadarm2 robotic arm toward the International Space Station’s Unity module for installation.
NASA’s coverage is underway for the installation of Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus XL spacecraft to the International Space Station on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and more. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms, including social media.
At 7:24 a.m. EDT, NASA astronaut Jonny Kim, with NASA astronaut Zena Cardman acting as backup, captured the Cygnus XL spacecraft using the International Space Station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm.
The spacecraft is carrying more than 11,000 pounds of scientific investigations and cargo to the orbiting laboratory. It launched at 6:11 p.m. EDT on Sept. 14 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Cygnus XL will remain at the space station until March 2026, when it will depart and dispose of several thousand pounds of trash by burning up during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.
