WASHINGTON — Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed Martin Corp. will build a tiny satellite called SkyFire that will catch a ride on a NASA mission to the moon in 2018.
SkyFire is a small cube satellite, or CubeSat. Its job will be to orbit the moon, using its high-tech infrared camera to take high-quality images of the moon’s surface. Lockheed says the mission will fill strategic gaps in lunar knowledge and will have implications for future human space exploration.
“The CubeSat will look for specific lunar characteristics like solar illumination areas,” said James Russell, Lockheed Martin’s SkyFire principal investigator.
“We’ll be able to see new things with sensors that are less costly to make and send to space.”
Lockheed Martin will pay for construction of the satellite. The contract with NASA gives Lockheed access to send the satellite on NASA’s Orion Exploration Mission 1, or EM-1, scheduled for September 2018.
NASA will get access to data from SkyFire’s mission.
The Lockheed SkyFire project is a partnership with the University of Colorado-Boulder.
SkyFire will be one of a dozen small CubeSats launched on the EM-1 mission, all intended for scientific and space study.
Lockheed says the mission is a proving ground for the new technology, and the infrared system on SkyFire could eventually be used for cost-effective studies of a planet’s resources before humans arrive, such as analyzing soil conditions, determining ideal landing sites and discovering a planet’s most livable areas.
