Future moon landing will leave U of M ‘footprint’

Physicist Keith Goetz developing instruments for new lunar investigations

MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL (07/17/2019) — The University of Minnesota will contribute instruments to a series of 12 new NASA investigations on the moon in preparation for landing astronauts there in 2024. The payloads will be delivered aboard three landers as part of NASA’s Artemis lunar program. Seven will be devoted to planetary science and heliophysics, five to demonstrating new technologies. Launches are tentatively set to begin in 2021.

The U of M project, led by physicist Keith Goetz, will be part of the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment (LuSEE), which will carry out extensive measurements of electromagnetic phenomena on the lunar surface. The principal investigator for LuSEE is U of M College of Science and Engineering alumnus Stuart Bale (M.S. Physics ’92, Ph.D. ’94), now a professor at the University of California Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory.

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