Long live Italy, Italy on the moon. Francesco De Gregori sang it in 1979, in one of his most modern pieces. We have all been singing it since yesterday, after learning that there is a piece of our country traveling towards our favorite satellite (also because it is the only one). On Space It is a satellite navigation receiver (Lugre is the acronym for Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment) born from a collaboration between the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and NASA: a very powerful instrument (the only non-American of the ten installed on lander and the first Italian to land on the Moon) which aims to «break the Guinness world record, currently in force, located halfway between the Earth and the Moon: no one to date has ever dared these distances», as explained in a note by the president of ASI Teodoro Valente.
The LuGRE receiver was developed in Italy by ASI through the Qascom company, which created the instrumentation and will support the mission’s operations, and with the scientific support of the Polytechnic of Turin, which contributed to the definition of the scientific objectives and will manage the data processing. Its purpose will be to capture the signals of the GPS and Galileo radio navigation satellites beyond their orbits and transmit them to the technology called Software Defined Radio Receiver, which allows the position in space to be precisely measured, even in environments very far from our planet. To date, only one NASA probe has used GPS signals, but at a distance equal to half the distance between the Earth and the Moon. LuGRE will attempt to improve on this result, thus becoming a global trailblazer.
After approximately 46 days of travel, the moon landing is expected on the Sea of Crisis at the beginning of March and from here, for 14 days, LuGRE will continue to operate producing lots of useful data. The «confirmation of the increasingly preponderant role of our country in facilitating the human presence in the new lunar exploration», Valente is proud.
Adolfo Urso, Minister of Business and Made in Italy and authority delegated to Space and Aerospace Policies, is also delighted. «With this frontier and challenging experiment, which will provide a significant contribution to the preparation of future lunar missions – he says – what promises to be a golden year for Italy in space.” Urso refers to the launch of the Pathfinder Hawk for Earth Observation satellite test of the Iris constellation, created by the Italian company Argotec, on Tuesday from the Californian base of Vanderberg.
«This operation will pave the way for Iride, the Earth observation program created by ESA in collaboration with ASI wanted by the Italian government and financed with Pnrr funds, and for future international lunar missions ».