INSIDE THE SKY AT NIGHT

In 2022, Craig Hardgrove told The Sky at Night about his Moon-ice-mapping project which would piggyback on NASA’s Artemis I. Here he looks back at how things went

Back in 2022, I spoke to the Sky at Night TV show and this magazine about the impending launch of a mission I’d spent the last seven years working on. At the time, we were on the cusp of sending a small but ambitious spacecraft to the Moon – one that aimed to push the boundaries of what CubeSats could achieve in deep space. The Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper, or LunaH-Map, was designed to map water and ice hidden within permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles. Launched on 16 November 2022 as a secondary payload aboard Artemis I, it aimed to demonstrate how small spacecraft could conduct high-value planetary science. A CubeSat about the size of a shoebox, LunaH-Map carried a miniature neutron spectrometer and an iodine-based electric propulsion…

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BBC Sky at Night United Kingdom (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2025

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