Month: January 2023

Lunar Flashlight is a 6U NASA cubesat whose mission is to detect the presence of water ice on permanently shadowed regions of the lunar south pole. It was launched on December 11 2022 together with Hakuto-R M1 (to which I dedicated my previous post). It travels using a low-energy transfer to lunar orbit, so it will arrive to the Moon in a few months.

The day after the launch, AMSAT-DL made an IQ recording of the X-band beacon of Lunar Flashlight at 8457.27 MHz with the 20 metre antenna at Bochum observatory. The recording was done on 2022-12-12 17:08:54 UTC and lasts 3 minutes 2 seconds. In this post I will analyse the recording.

Hakuto-R Mission 1 is a private lunar mission led by the Japanese company ispace. It consists of a lander, which carries the Emirates Lunar Mission rover Rashid and JAXA/Tomy’s SORA-Q toy-like robot. It was launched on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral together with the cubesat Lunar Flashlight on 11 December 2022, and will attempt to land on the Moon approximately 4.5 months after launch.

AMSAT-DL made some recordings of Lunar Flashlight and Hakuto-R M1 in the days following the launch using the 20 meter antenna at Bochum observatory. Here I will look at two recordings of the X-band telemetry signal of Hakuto-R M1 at 8492.5 MHz done on 2022-12-11 at 22:48:43 (121 seconds at 1.25 Msps IQ) and 23:23:08 UTC (54 seconds at 5 Msps IQ).