Good morning everyone. I'm the CLIPS project scientist for I am One, so I'm working with all the NASA payload teams and Doctor Deborah Needham, our headquarters program scientists, to ensure that operations maximize the science and technology return from our payloads. First, I want to give you a little overview of what CLIPS is all about. The goal here is for us to investigate the moon in preparation for Artemis really to do business differently. For NASA.
One of our main goals is to make sure that we develop a lunar economy. For clips, we NASA hitch a ride on a lunar Lander that's developed by commercial industry. These aren't NASA mittens, they're commercial mittens. These commercial companies will be bringing our instruments along for the ride, enabling our investigations by providing power, data and calm to us. With the commercial industry comes a competitive environment, which means that our investment upfront ultimately gets far more
for far less. So instead of 1 mission in a decade, it allows for more like 10 commercial missions to the moon in a decade. Instead of four or five instruments in that one decade, it's more like 4 to five dozen instruments. Being risk risk tolerant allows for high yield and high reward. And this is the beauty of clips we'll learn from what doesn't doesn't work. Testing many technologies. Conducting experiments at a lower cost and significantly faster than traditional NASA
missions. This will allow us to prepare for Artemis more efficiency, more efficiently. When you change the frequency of missions and the risk Prosper retains how you do things, opportunities arise for far more science and technology investigations. A far greater number of places you can go to on the moon, and the diversity of people involved. Blooms to inspire all future explorers.
This is clipped the first commercial miss, and for intuitive Mccoons will hold a suite of six NASA payloads. The landing site that we're going to is a relatively safe and flat area, a little ways from the Mellippert, a crater about 10° from the South Pole. The South Pole is generally
fairly rough area. This will give our commercial vendor Intuitive Machines an opportunity to bring this suite of payloads to an area that will be the farthest S that any private Lander has ever been to on the moon. And it will give us an opportunity to test our instruments in this very harsh environment where the Sun is always low on horizon, the temperature gets quite cold and will help us keep what problems does face us in communicating with the Earth when it's also rather low.
Our lane one payload is going to help us learn about communicating from areas around the South Pole like this. The NASA payloads on IM1 will also test technologies it'll pave for the way for how to navigate to and land safely and autonomously on the lunar surface, including NDL that eases lasers to guide how fast and how close the Lander is during landing. LRA That reflects laser light right back to the incoming or orbiting spacecraft.
With the laser, to give future spacecraft a reference point on the lunar surface lane, One will test technologies that'll act like a lighthouse, but as a radio beacon. Similar to how you use your GPS. R FM G will measure propellants and fuel left in the tanks to allow for a safe landing, ensuring that we have enough fuel when we land. Scallops will image the engine exhaust turning up dust on the
surface. This will expose fresh surface underneath, and the suite of cameras will then continue to image that surface for science investigation. And finally, Roses will investigate influences of the Sun on the lunar surface, both for science and to help better prepare for Artemis missions and to conduct radio astronomy for the first time from the moon. All very exciting. We'll defer back to you. Thank you so much, Sue. We'll now hand it over to our eclipse payload team.
Let's begin with Farzin and the Jugarian for the navigation Doppler lighter Farzin. Good morning navigation. Doppler Lidar is a laser sensor that shoots 3 laser beams to the ground and measures spacecraft velocity. That's the speed and the direction of the flight and the altitude above the ground is when the vehicle begins its decent toward the landing site, so it comes on during the last
few minutes of the meeting. This is the critical phase that every event, every maneuver, every truck, the firing has to be perfectly on the queue. This is those minutes of terror. By providing very precise velocity and altitude data, the NDL enables the spacecraft to navigate this exactly to the landing site and help it touchdown gently at the intended
location. So the NDL will play an important role in the future landing missions as we are moving toward landing in rough terrain and putting the Landers at precise locations, perhaps at the edge of a Cliff or clothed deployed assets. This I am 1 mission will be a great demonstration of this technology for those future missions, including human missions to the moon. Thank you. Thank you, Farzin. Next up we have Camera stadium for Lunar Node 1 camera.
Yes, good morning. I'm Tamara Stadium with NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and I'm the Co Investigator for the Lunar Node One payload Lunar Node One or lane one is a navigation beacon demonstration. Its goal will be to demo autonomous navigation technologies that are desperately needed to support a growing lunar architecture. As lunar activity increases around the moon though, 2 will demand increase on Earth based systems like the Deep Space
Network for navigation needs. While these systems provide great capability, the capacity will be outpaced by the number of users. LN1 takes advantage of Cube Sat flight hardware. It's a small platform, easily integrated into future elements of lunar infrastructure. LN1 utilizes the Multi Spacecraft Autonomous Positioning System, or maps with maps. Every lunar element serves as a node in a greater network and nodes share packets that embed their time and state in a
standardized format. With reception of a packet, a node is able to form range and range rate observation from a source that is broadcasting out its local position. In this approach, each asset can become a navigation reference L and one will also demo A1 way ranging signal similar to that
used within GPS satellites. This enables an alternate approach to determine distances between assets and when combined with map transmission of position and time, allows it to operate in a similar manner to AGPS. Through the light lane, one demonstrates one node of a greater network and then throughout transit and on the surface of the Moon, the payload will broadcast telemetry pockets to Earth where the signal will be received by the Deep Space Network, processed and an absolution.
Compared against others like that of the Iron Lander, future upgraded versions of Lane One will demo two way ranging survive the night capability as well as integration capability with the Luna net, COM and NAV infrastructure. Thank you. Thank you so much, Tamara. Next up we have Daniel Crimmins for the Laser Retro Reflector Array. Daniel.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Daniel Crimmins from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and I'm the deputy principal investigator for the Laser Retro Reflector Array instrument, or LRA, as you may know. LRA is a completely passive. Instrument consisting of a hemispherical array of special glass prisms called retro reflectors. What they do is they return the light back directly towards the illumination source. Similar optical phenomenon is
used in Rd. markers to make them shine brightly under a car's. Headlights. On a quips flander, however, LRA will act as a precise marker of the Lander position and that will be visible under illumination from either a laser ranging system on board and orbiting or landing spacecraft. Now LRA requires no power, no thermal control or interaction with the Lander, which allows it to be used for decades on a lunar surface and in the challenging lunar condition
thermal conditions. LRA will be used to geolocate the Lander on the surface with high precision, measure any changes in the Lander position over long time periods, and determine the precise orbit or landing trajectory of a spacecraft illuminating it the LRA. The LRA team is very excited to be a part of the intuitive machines. Mission. Thank you. Thank you so much, Daniel. Over to you Nat Gopalswami, for the radio observations of the lunar surface Photo electron sheet.
Nat. Hello everyone. This is a radio telescope operating in the frequency range from three kilowatts to 30 megahertz to observe cosmic and terrestrial radio waves on the moon. Low frequency cosmic radio waves cannot be detected on Earth due to the intervening ionosphere. We also will detect the powerful auroral kilometric radiation originating at several 1000 miles above that store various transmitted sun.
Has broadcast wide-ranging radio waves that are also appearing as noise on the moon, adding to any noise generated by the mechanisms on the land. The Sun emits different types of radio bursts that will be detected by roses. These bursts are caused by energetic electrons interacting with solar magnetic fields. They inform us about the physical conditions in the corona and interplanetary medium, and also about solar flares and Coronal Mass Effect
sources. Will detect intense radio emissions from Jupiter. Such emissions are also known from Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The knowledge on planetary radio mission will be helpful in detecting exoplanets using radio telescopes in the future. Also can measure the electron density and vertical gradient above the lunar surface. These are photo electrons knocked off from the solar surface by sunlight. The impact of lunar dust on those of antennas is expected to produce detectable radio signal.
These dust impacts are known to peak at the Terminator and are responsible for the so-called horizon glove. Finally the radio intensity of the Milky Way Galaxy peaks and that also frequency detecting and characterizing the galactic background emission is important for cosmological studies. There also this instrument on IM One is thus poised to contribute to answering wide-ranging science questions. Thank you. Thanks so much, Nat.
Next up is Michelle Monk for the Stereo camera for Lunar Plume Surface Studies. Michelle, over to you. Hi, welcome everybody. I'm Michelle Monk from the NASA Langley Research Center and I'm the Principal investigator for the stereo cameras for Lunar Plume, Surface Studies and Scouts. Scouts is comprised of four small cameras mounted near the bottom of the Odysseus Lander and oriented so that they can view the surface under the main
engine. The cameras will take images during vertical descent towards the moon, through touchdown and then engine shut down. They'll continue to take images periodically throughout the lunar day until the mission. Using a stereo photogrammetry technique, our team will then reconstruct A3 dimensional tape of the lunar surface to see the extent of a Rosen that occurred during landing.
The scalps measurement is going to provide us a critical data set, anchor computer models for predicting plume focus interaction effects. These effects will be really important to understand as we start to send larger Landers to the moon and with humans, and to aggregate assets close together to support the sustained lunar presence in Artemis. Thank you. Thank you. Michelle And then finally over to Lauren Amin for the radio frequency mass gauge. Lauren.
Hi, good morning. I'm Lauren Amin. I'm the Deputy Manager of the Cryogenic Fluid Management Portfolio Office at the NASA Glen Research Center and I'm here today on behalf of the Radio Frequency Mass Gauge Team or R FM. GR FM G is one of the cryogenic fluid management technologies and development within our portfolio office, but RFMG and IM One will demonstrate a sensor technology that's been in development at NASA Glen for
over the last 15 years. RFMG allows more accurate in space cryogenic fuel gauging and spacecraft fuel tanks like those in IM1 Noviceelander. Our engineers do this by measuring the electromagnetic spectrum or radio waves within the tanks throughout the mission. Compare them to a vast fluid simulation database our team's been building. Accurately gauge how much propellant is inside those tanks. RFMG has been has been proven in many ground tests.
A suborbital parabolic flight also on an experiment on the International Space Station. RFMGS demo on IM One will provide NASA for the very first time long duration microgravity data that will be used to iterate and scale the technology to enable improved spacecraft and Lander operations. This RFMG technology is critical and enabling for future long duration missions that use cryogenic propellants.
With our FMG could potentially say fuel and take the guesswork out of space spacecraft design and operations in the future. Thank you. Thank you so much, Lauren, and thanks to our briefers for those initial remarks for awareness. We also have some additional massive subject matter experts on the line in case there are specific questions that come up. We'll now open it up for questions. Again, for those of you on the line today, please press * one
to submit a question. And once your name is called, please state your name, affiliation and to whom you'd like to direct your question. If you find that your question has already been answered, press * two with Star 2 to withdraw it. Our first question is from Jonathan at Fox News. Jonathan, your line is now open. Good morning, everyone. Jonathan Sarri with Fox News. Thanks so much for doing this briefing. My question for any of the NASA experts.
Who'd like to jump in? As you look ahead to crude landings on the moon with the Artemis program, what would you say is the most important thing or the biggest unknown that you're hoping to learn about the South polar region through the IM 1 mission? Thank you. Take that off, sorry. First thing this is to the project scientist for the IM1, all the the payloads.
So for the South Pole, it's a really, really harsh environment and what we have planned for IM one really kind of concentrates on this space landing and making for the and also communicate back to the Earth. Sometimes when you're at a very, very low point on the horizon, the communications can kind of bounce along the terrain coming and going. So having a location that's close to the South Pole will help us to start investigating those kinds of things that are
happening. Ellen One will help us with those investigations. And also because the environment is quite hard, it's going to give us a baseline for understanding things like how do solar panels work and how do the instruments function in these very cold temperatures or warm temperatures when the sun is shining on. So I think it's a very good place to start having some slightly more straightforward payloads that investigate how to sell a pole, acts, what the environment is like to help us
with future missions. Perfect. Thank you. Our next question comes from Will Robinson Smith from Spaceflight Now. Will, Your line is now open. Yes, hi, Will Robinson Smith Space Flight. Now thank you so much for taking the time to answer our questions.
One to Lauren and mean if I could in the data that you'll be getting back from the radio frequency map page, is the intent to, you know, not just for you know future clips mission, but for the human landing system program Lander contractor, SpaceX, Blue Origin. Principally the goal to share that data with them to help better inform some of their
cryogenic propellant transfer. Both demonstrations as well as the actual performance thereof during the Artemis missions that they're a part of. Thanks. Hey, yeah, this is Lauren. Yeah. So the opportunity to to understand and demonstrate RFMG.
During the. Most of the transit phase of the Odysseus Lander, it's gonna give us an opportunity to understand how the data correlates with what I talked about that best fluid simulation database which is really how we estimate how how much propellant is in the tank. Like all the other space technology projects at at NASA, we absolutely intend on improving our our data and and sharing that with all of our commercial partners not just
those for HLS. So hopefully that answers your question, but absolutely, I think the intent is to infuse this RFMG technology and. All future missions. Where where that makes sense to really try to improve our cryogenic food management. Capability. Thanks, Lauren, and thanks for that question. We're now going to hear some questions we received from our social media platforms using the hashtag ask NASA.
And our first question comes from Instagram and it was what type of fuel is the lunar Lander using? Sue, I'm going to hand that question over to you to respond to. So we're going to be using both liquid oxygen and liquid methane. These are both cryogenic fuels. And I'm actually going to pass that right back over to Lauren because their team is working very closely with Intuitive machines on their Liquid profile. Hey, Sue, Yeah, you're correct.
Liquid oxygen, liquid methane. And I'll just say too that our RFMG team has been working with the IM one team over the last week during their wet dress rehearsals and those have gone really well. And so we've we've proven out that our RFMG pillow is is working. Perfect. Thank you both.
Our next question from using the hashtag ask NASA comes from Facebook and that is how much space or mass does the Lander or the payloads take up. So for this purpose, since we are looking at the NASA provided lunar payloads, let's talk about how much mass the NASA payloads take up on I NS Nova C Lander and I will give that one to sue. Sorry. Yeah. So I think we actually have Chris Culbert in the room and he might actually know the answer to that question off the top of his head.
I do not. Sure. So it's in the range of 40 kilograms. For the first two missions that Cliff sponsored, we were a little on the lighter side. You'll you'll probably note that our later missions are closer to 100 kilograms. But for I am first missing here. It's close to 40kg of NASA payloads. Thank you both. Now we'll go back to a couple of questions from the media. And Next up we have Bill Harwood from CBS News. Bill, your line is now open. Hey, thank you very much.
I have two quick questions. One from Michelle is, is, is the payload primarily just to demonstrate the technology and show how it works or do you expect to actually learn something about the the soil in that region? In other words, is there what are you expecting from that soil at the landing site? And the second question I think is for Susan, not no, I'm sorry, not for Susan. Let me get my name straight here.
I'm sorry for Lauren. Can you give us a little more info on how the the testing worked? I mean, I don't know when they fuel your spacecraft during the countdown or how any of that works. Is is we don't really have any details about that. Thanks. OK. This is Michelle. I'll take the first part of that. Thanks for the question. This is actually both of technology demonstration and hopefully some use for science. I guess I'd call it more of an
engineering measurement. But we are really excited about the opportunity to go towards the South Pole because that is an area as Sue mentioned that we haven't landed in before. So we have the video from the Apollo landings in the Mari region, where you see, you know, lots of dust blown around thrown out from the base of the Apollo Landers, and we really want to see if the behavior is similar at the South Pole.
Now granted, this Odysseus Lander is a much different scale than Apollo or from the Landers descended, but this starts us on the path of those demonstrating that this instrument can make measurements and getting some early knowledge about the South Pole Regulus and how it will behave. So I hope that answers it. Thank you and. If I can just step in real quick, this is Sue.
And one of the things that we at NASA do is when we have instruments that are designed to gather data that can be used for science, we have something called the Planetary Data System, which is online where the images and the data such as what scouts is going to be collecting. It's actually archived for future use for scientists to continue to use that data to understand better what the surface of the moon is like in this case. And this will be archived with the PDF.
And I can tell you that, at least from my past as an astronomer using images to study different types of astronomical bodies, the images themselves can be used to really dig in when you see the the very close and features. And so I expect that we're going to get some really good science out of the imagery that's coming back from scalps without a doubt. All right. And this is Chris Culvert, I'll I'll I'll hit your second question about the the ground OPS for The LOX methane.
So this is the first time we've flown LOX methane off of one of the old settle pads 39 A. So it did require some modification to the shuttle pads to allow the SpaceX to fuel the Lander while it's on the pad. And because these are cryogenic fuels that will boil off if they get too warm you you put that
fuel in pretty late. So right now, we expect they will start fueling both the the tanks on the Lander about 3 hours before liftoff and it takes a couple of hours to fill the tanks up. You want to make sure that they maintain the right temperatures all the way through that load process and you have to get the right temperature before you can launch. But they run a couple of wet dress rehearsals over the last week to demonstrate all that systems that have all worked very well.
So we're looking forward to a very successful launch this week. Thank you all. Our next question comes from Gina Sinceri at ABC News. Gina, your line is now open. Thank you. This question is for Farzin. I'm interested in the Lidar experiment. How important are lasers becoming in this kind of exploration? OK, yes, this is Farzin from NASA language.
That's a tough question. So as we are looking into these more challenging, more ambitious landing missions, LIDAR and LASER is going to be playing much as important role as we're going forward. The navigation doctor LIDAR that provides the velocity and altitude there is sort of can think of it of a replacement of the radar sensors that were used before. But the precision of this laser sensor is at least an order of magnitude greater.
So the the quality of data, the precisions would would really help these landing vehicle to navigate more precisely toward the landing site. So this is just one aspect. We are also looking at LIDAR for doing hazard detection on the landing. That is once we are reached the landing location and we are starting to do a vertical descent, we want to be able to map the terrain and figure where
the hazards are. The make sure that the Lander does not land on the piece of rock or or or a crater hole and and that's another area that the the laser and LIDAR can play a critical role. Yet there is another application for the lasers that are being looked at and that is trained
relative navigation. That is, when we are way off maybe 20-30 kilometers above the ground, using the laser to look at the features right below and look for known features that can give us a good position and formation. I'm sorry for you know touching all these technologies, but let me let me summarize them. So when we are coming down, let's say we're going to the moon and we are starting at 3020 kilometers above the ground and we are kind of horizontally or
it's not at the path going down. The laser can look at the train below to find known features, so we know where we are. Then we have the navigation Doppler larger that's going to be demonstrated on this mission to provide very precise velocity and altitude data for the vehicle to navigate precisely to the landing site. And once we get there, a laser can scan the ground below and the so we can avoid the hazards and landed vehicle between you know, rocks and craters
precisely. I I hope that answers your question. That was great. Farzin. Thank you both. Thank you so much. We're going to switch gears for a moment and go back to questions on social media using the hashtag ask NASA from Instagram. How will the Lander or the payloads recharge? And can the Lander rotate to face the sun? I'm actually going to ask Chris Culbert, program manager for Cliff, to answer that question. Chris. Sure. So yeah, recharging is done
through solar arrays. So the Lander will have solar arrays on it that will capture energy from the sun, turn in electricity, and pass it on to the payloads during transit to the moon. Yes, the Lander will rotate or or adjust its attitude so that the solar arrays get the right amount of sun, sun on them so it can generate power once it lands on the moon, No, it's landed. It doesn't move anymore. The solar rays are not on gimbals or mechanisms that let
them change their direction. So intuitive machines have spent a fair amount of energy analyzing where they're landing, where the sun's going to be, and how the sun will cross the horizon during the portion of lunar day that they're there. And then they they they they design the Lander arrays canted such that they capture the right amount of sunlight to generate electricity. Thank you, Chris. Our next question from from social media is about lunar
dust. So is moon dust analysis plan and I think I'm going to turn that over to the SCALP team that's on the line. This is Michelle. I'm not quite sure about Moon dust investigation. Back to the answer that you provided.
I think, you know, close up imagery of the regular particles will be, you know, very instructive going forward are our cameras will have fields of view that have Lander purposes in them so that we can see over time if the dust moves around and how it clings to different purposes. And we hope to make measurements like this on future Landers so that we can build up more knowledge of of the dust behavior. Thanks.
Yeah, this is Albert. I'll, I'll add a little bit to that one for Michelle. So this mission in particular is mostly Pakistan imagery, which will tell us what how dust behaves when it's blasted during the descent and how we'll move around, as Michelle just described, on some future mix. And we'll have some more advanced experiments which actually take a look at how the dust interacts with materials
and surfaces. But that won't be on this first mix and those are going to be in some future mix. And if I can just add in that there's one other sensor that we have on board and that is Roses has four radio antennas and one of the modes that they have for collecting their science is to actually detect dust as it impacts the antenna.
So Nat, I don't know if you want to speak a little bit about that capability, but that can also help us understand the dust, how it purges up and help us to design future space suits as well to figure out how to minimize the dust cleaning to the suits. Nat, do you have anything to add? I would like to add that the the dust impact actually increases that the Terminator when. So we may have have to do some operations in the night to
understand more about this dust. So the basic detection mechanism is dust hitting the antenna will produce a small voltage signal. Thank you. Thank you all for responding to that question from social media. We'll now switch it back to questions from the media. First up, we have Kenneth Chang with the New York Times. Kenneth, your line is now open. Kenneth, can you hear us right? We'll go back. Let's go over to Jeff S with Space News. Jeff, your line is open. Good morning.
Two quick questions, one for. Farzin. What sort of? Landing accuracy Can the navigation Doppler Lidar provide? How does it compare, for example, to what Japan's slim Lander achieved last month? And then for Susan or? Chris there any special coordination issues among the payloads to ensure? That they all get the. Power and communications that they need at the various phases of the mission. Thanks. OK, this is Farazan. I answered the first part of
your question. So navigation, Dover Lidar like I mentioned earlier can provide very high precision velocity and altitude data order of magnitude better than radars. Now in terms of the precision landing, that really depends on the vehicle itself, how it's going to use this data to improve its precision and that's really depends on the under the landing vehicle. And I cannot really comment about for example this I am within me.
Now I do like to add that that I am one that an overseas vehicle does and this mission does use the NDL data to help it with improving its precision landing. So we are not a primary or critical sensor on the on the vehicle, but the data is used to help with that precision And in terms of how precise is that then it's really and I am a question. So far as I'm just this cover, I'll add a little bit to that.
We, NASA's requirement for this mission, weren't very challenging for the very first landing on the moon. I am has told us they believe they'll have accuracy in the 100m range, which is comfortable to the swim mix and from Japan, but we're not really pushing that as a as a high priority this mix and we'll have some future mix and which will require at least 100m accuracy. Thank you all. Let's go back to Kenneth. Sorry, Sue, do you have anything to add? Oh that was me firstly.
And actually since we are talking about future missions I'd like to add that with the laser lighter technology it is possible to get these precisions to meters regime mentioned. With the train related navigation that is looking at the terrain features with the laser beam getting a very good position knowledge and the navigation Doppler larger to navigate to that location and and the scanning the train for for known feature. Again upon landing we can get
down to meters type regime. When we did demonstrations here in the past using larger technologies about a decade ago, we would we got down to about 10 centimeters. So. So this type of precision is quite achievable. Thank you. And just going back to the question about coordination with the payload, this is an excellent question and it's something that we've been working on for quite some years with both our individual payload teams coordinated with Intuitive
machines. We have 6 payloads on board. They have six additional commercial payloads on board as well. So in the years leading up to the operations, we ensure that we have what our requests are for what our payloads need for operating to include and machines and then we coordinate together with timeline tools.
NASA Ames has created a great playbook plan where we and they have a timeline tool as well, where we put all of our plans for when each of the payloads are operating so that we can see a full coordination to infer that the payloads don't
interfere. And then as well, when payloads can run in parallel that we maximize the amount of science return by allowing payloads that can autonomously take data, continue taking data while other payloads need to have kind of a step by step interacting with their payload to collect data coming back. But this is all very well coordinated and the plan has been in place for some time. And so I expect that we're going to really maximize the science return. Thank you so much all for
responding to that question. Let's go back to see Ken Chang from the New York Times. Your line is now open. Ken, can you hear us now? Yes. Great. Thank you. Sorry about. Passing up earlier. I was wanting to ask about the landing site. It was moved through the South polar. Region and we've heard about wanting to learn about the regulars in this area, but I was wondering what other. Signs you might be able to get. From being here versus the original. Landing site.
Thank you. That's an excellent question. So this particular landing site is a very old terrain and so the terrain is, if you for the geologists on board, it's more of a standard philosophic kind of Highlands, and it's similar
to the Apollo 16 site. So it tells us a little bit more about the original crustal materia from when the lunar magma ocean cold and of course being beat up by impacts for billions of years, covered up by the impact ejecta can allow some of the material underneath to the surface. So all of this information can help our scientists better understand a little bit more about the the Highlands of the moon and then be able to compare it to the Apollo 6 moon site from the science side. Thank you.
Next up we have Leonard David, but the Scientific American magazine. Leonard, your line is now open. OK. Thank you for Michelle. You know. Going to the South. Pole we haven't been there. What kind of modeling? Has been done about the dust that you may or may not run into there and the other question. Would be for Dan on the LRA. You know you've got slim. Has an LRA on it. And the Indian spacecraft, so? Are those active?
Are you doing some? Experiments with lasers from from LRO or. Or what's the status there? Thank you. Hi, Leonard, this is Michelle. Thanks for the question. Yeah, we hope to learn quite a
bit about this new area. In terms of modeling, we have, you know, the Lunar source book as our source of regular data from Apollo. And of course there are some, you know, unknowns in there about, you know, different phenomenon, different characteristics of the regular in regions that we haven't actually directly measured yet.
So you know, compaction and everything comes from the scientific observations and so there's quite a bit of uncertainty on different parameters that we would use in a model to predict the amount of cratering or the amount of. Regular. That's, you know, ejected from under a Lander and how big the particles are and how far they would go. So those are all the types of, you know, effects that we're trying to capture. We will not capture them all with scalps.
It's near. It's merely of, you know, optical measurements of what the surface looks like. After we land on future Landers, we hope to add more types of instruments that can build upon scalps and measure the ejecta itself, as well as effects on the Lander surfaces like the Lander base. So those are future plans. Our models are pretty immature, I'd say at this point. Or unvalidated because we haven't measured these phenomena
directly before. What we really want to do to understand this completely, you know it's going to vary with each location somewhat and with each Lander size, mass engine configuration. And so having that predictive model that can span all of those different like cases is going to be, you know, the key for really predicting what's going to happen on future flights. So in order to get that we want to make these in situ measurements at the moon like
with scouts and future payloads. We also want to conduct ground testing where we can carefully control the parameters and investigate you know a wide parameter how to get a dated model. Thanks. And this is Daniel Crimmins for LRA. Thanks for the question. We are indeed continuing to reign to the two LR as currently on the surface from the Chandrayan 3 mission and the SLIM mission. As you know, the SLIM Lander is is at a non optimal attitude for
how we plan to use LRA. But we do still think that we'll be able to range to LRA in its current kind of off nominal configuration. And the L, the orbit of LRO at the moment allows us to attempt to range to each LRA about once every two weeks or so. And so we will continue to do this, you know, as long as LRO and the laser altimeter on board
is operational. And I'd encourage you to next month at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, the LRAPI Shout, Doctor Sally's son will be giving a presentation on the ranging results to sound around 3:00 and we'll also update on any results that happened essentially from January until March. Thanks. Thank you. Next up we have Alexandra. What's from Nature Magazine. Alexandra, your line is now open. Great. Thanks very much My. Question is about.
Roses, so it's for Nat. Could you talk a little bit about the sources of interference expected? I mean that the Chinese had that Lander on the far side where they were trying to do radio astronomy and got a lot of interference from their Lander. What are you anticipating in terms of interference, both from the Lander itself and then also of course being on the near side instead of the far side?
Thank you for the question. For the near side, the main inference is actually, as I mentioned, it's from the terrestrial transmitters. And these are expected and have been detected, you know, once or twice when the wind spacecraft was closer to the moon. And these appear as the horizontal lines in the, you know, daily Spectra we take and therefore it's easy to identify these interferences and then still subtract them out to get the real signal from for
example, the sun. So that is definitely, you know, a a very horizontal state line. So it's easy to extract. Now for the land that this is one of the things that we do not know, we are going to characterize them. So that is that is actually completely unknown at this stage. Thanks for the question. The next one is next line we have is Jim Siegel with NASA Tech. Jim, your line is now open. Oh, thank you for taking my question and good luck on this. Particular mission I'm curious I.
Understand that there are about. 6 or. Seven other clips missions that. Have been. Planned. Or are on the books and I'm wondering are they all going to go to? The same location and are. They going to build. On each other in terms of knowledge that is 1 build time in the other and pose one or two of them, don't make it. Is that going to danger? The timing on the on the art of the street. Thank you. OK. That's Chris Colbert.
I'll, I'll, I'll take that one. So yes, we have a number of missions, I think we're up through nine scheduled to the moon at this point. They are all going to a variety of locations mostly driven by the science that we're trying to achieve. You can't do the same science at every spot in the moon. So the objectives of the payloads tend to drive where we take them.
We are having a number of missions that go to the South Pole because of course that's of high interest to future human exploration and there is complementary science across the missions. As we learn things from 1 mission, we'll be able to help calibrate and prepare for future missions more effectively. So we are certainly doing some of that, but none of our missions are directly linked to Artemis 3 or the planning part of three. The data we gather will help agency plan better for all
people Artemis making. But if we lose one or two, which is what this was was intended, or we knew could happen, it won't endanger the Artemis mission with the Artemis. Planning. Thank you, Chris. Our next question comes from Will Robinson Smith from Spaceflight Now Will. Your line is now open.
Yes, hi. Thanks for taking another question from us. Follow up, if I may, to Bill Harwood's question from a little bit earlier to Chris Colbert, Can you provide a little bit more detail regarding the WDRS and how they performed, if there were any leaks that came up or any other issues? And another quick follow up, what are the T0 liftoff options for the backup windows on the 15th and 16th? Thanks. So on the wet dress rehearsals, you probably have to ask basics
about that. SpaceX and two machine actually ran those we those aren't NASA function. Sorry we missed the second part. What was your second question? Well. Just if you have the T0 for the backup dates on the 50s and 60s. Actually, I don't have those handy. We think that'll be coming out and something later on this week, but I don't have them
handy with me right now. So with regards to launch windows and and timings, we we recommend that you reach out to the launch provider, so in this case SpaceX for responses on T minus. Zero for the other launch opportunities. So thanks to all who submitted questions today and thanks to our briefers for taking the time to discuss NASA's CLIPS initiative and their payloads aboard Intuitive Machines is IM 1 mission.
As a reminder, SpaceX is targeting no earlier than 12:57 AM Eastern on Wednesday, February 14th for a Falcon 9 launch of Intuitive Machines first lunar Lander to the moon surface. We appreciate you joining us. A recording of this briefing will be available on nasa.gov/clips.