CU Boulder Students Help Launch New Lunar Mission
BOULDER, Colo. (CBS4)- There is a new moon mission in the works and students at the University of Colorado in Boulder are at the center of it all. Their plan is to send hundreds of tiny spacecraft to the moon; each one will only be the size of a leaf.
Arvind Aradhy a graduate student at CU is helping launch "The Great Lunar Expedition for Everyone" also known as GLEE.
"It's something an opportunity to get involved and actually put stuff on the moon," Aradhy said.
The name and the idea behind the mission started with Colorado Space Grant Director Chris Koehler.
"People were talking to us about what are you going to do for the 50th anniversary and I said. 'Let's stop celebrating and let's start doing, again' so that's where the idea came from. What could we do that got the next generation excited about going to the moon again," he said.
The mission is to hitch a ride to the moon and deploy 500 LunaSats, or tiny spacecraft, onto its surface by 2023.
Each of the leaf-sized spacecraft will include a handful of data sensors, programmed by teams of students from around the world.
"Because there is so many of them you can have students from all over participate in developing those missions for individual satellites," Koehler said.
Before any of it can happen, the team at University of Colorado must engineer the tiny spacecraft so it is easy to use, develop a module to deliver it on to the moon's surface and build awareness around the project to ensure its global success.
"It's probably aiming for the moon, literally," Aradhy laughed, "but also if we get that kind of support and that kind of involvement in a team maybe at some point we can support grander ambitions of space exploration,"
You can learn more about the mission by following along on social media or visiting their website at https://www.glee2023.org/