NASA, Nokia To Set Up First Mobile Network On Moon

NASA, in collaboration with Nokia, will set up the first mobile network on the Moon as part of the Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission.

The Lunar Surface Communication System (LSCS), developed by Nokia, will be deployed on Thursday and will use the same cellular technology used on Earth to establish connectivity on the lunar surface.

The mobile network will handle surface connectivity between the lander and vehicles, carrying high-definition video streaming, command-and-control communications, and telemetry data.

Thierry Klein, president of Nokia Bell Labs Solutions Research, said that the network can withstand radiation, extreme temperatures, and vibrations which will be experienced during the launch, flight, and landing.

He said that all the components are kept in a single “network in a box”, which contains everything needed for a cell network except the antenna and a power source.

The mission will utilize two lunar mobility vehicles: the Intuitive Machines Micro-Nova Hopper and Lunar Outpost’s Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP) rover.

The two vehicles will be deployed on the lunar surface, where they would use the device modules to establish connections to the network on the Athena lander. However, the network will work only for a few days due to lunar nights.

This network mission paves the way for future lunar missions, including the Artemis program, which plans to bring the astronauts back to the Moon as early as 2028.

Nokia is also working on integrating cell communications in spacesuits for lunar astronauts. “Maybe just one network in a box, one tower, would provide the entire coverage, or maybe we would need multiple of these. That’s not going to be different from what you see in terrestrial cell networks deployment”, Klein told MIT Technology Review.

NASA’s Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1 (PRIME-1) will be conducted alongside the mobile network mission. PRIME-1 will demonstrate drilling into the Moon’s surface, bring regolith, and look for the presence of volatiles using a mass spectrometer.