Lunar Ultraviolet Cosmic Imager
A small UV telescope planned for the Moon, canceled after lander withdrawal.
The Lunar Ultraviolet Cosmic Imager (LUCI) is a small planned telescope designed to scan the sky in near ultraviolet wavelengths from the lunar surface. Developed by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics as a technology demonstrator, it was to be deployed by the commercial Z-01 lander as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services. The mission was canceled after the lander's builder, OrbitBeyond, withdrew from its CLPS contract in July 2019.
Quick Facts
- Operator
- Indian Institute of Astrophysics
- Mission duration
- Telescope: few months
- Spacecraft
- Z-01 lander
- Payload mass
- Total: ~30 kg / 66.1 lb; LUCI: 1.85 kg / 4.08 lb
- Dimensions
- Telescope: 45 cm / 1 ft 6 in × 15 cm / 5.91 in
- Telescope name
- LUCI
- Telescope diameter
- 30 cm / 1 ft
- Telescope focal length
- 945 mm / 3 ft 1 in
Facts from the source article.
Science objectives
LUCI's science goals include searching for transient astronomical events such as supernovae, novae, tidal disruption events by massive black holes, and energetic sources like superluminous supernovae and flashes from cosmic collisions. It will also look for faint asteroids and comets in the Solar System, particularly near-Earth objects and potentially hazardous objects, focusing on UV sources not accessible by larger space missions.
Overview
The Moon lacks an atmosphere and ionosphere, making it an ideal location for a telescope since Earth’s air blocks and scatters ultraviolet light, which is crucial for studying the active universe. The lunar surface offers a stable and relatively cheap platform for long-term observations in wavelengths that large orbital missions often avoid. Only two previous UV telescopes have operated from the Moon: Apollo 16’s instrument in 1972 and the Chang’e 3 lander’s telescope in 2018. India’s Department of Science and Technology funded LUCI, which began in 2013 under the leadership of Jayant Murthy. The telescope was finished by March 2019 and was set to be integrated into the Z-01 lander, launching in the third quarter of 2020 on a Falcon 9 to land at Mare Imbrium. However, on 29 July 2019, the lander’s builder, OrbitBeyond, pulled out of the launch and the mission, effectively ending it. OrbitBeyond was released from its NASA CLPS contract but can still bid on future ones. LUCI is a small technology demonstrator with no three-axis pointing capability, so it depends on the sky’s motion across the lunar day. Its optics consist of two spherical mirrors and a double-pass corrector lens, with an 80 mm all-spherical primary lens feeding a photon-counting CCD detector sensitive from 200 to 900 nanometers. A solar blind filter limits the bandpass to 200–320 nanometers. The instrument was designed to stay mostly inside the lander, retracting into a storage bay during the cold lunar nights, with a planned operational baseline of a few months.
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