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Goddard Engineering and Technology Directorate

Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE)

Artistic rendering of LuGRE and the GNSS constellations. In reality, the Earth-based GNSS constellations take up less than 10 degrees in the sky, as seen from the Moon.
Artist’s concept rendering of LuGRE aboard the Blue Ghost lunar lander receiving signals from Earth’s GNSS constellations. NASA/Dave Ryan

“This mission is more than a technological milestone,” said Joel Parker, policy lead for positioning, navigation, and timing at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We want to enable more and better missions to the Moon for the benefit of everyone, and we want to do it together with our international partners.”

As the Artemis campaign leads humanity to the Moon and eventually Mars, NASA is refining its state-of-the-art navigation and positioning technologies to guide a new era of lunar exploration.

A technology demonstration helping pave the way for these developments is the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) payload, a joint effort between NASA and the Italian Space Agency to demonstrate the viability of using existing GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) signals for positioning, navigation, and timing on the Moon.

During its voyage on an upcoming delivery to the Moon as part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative, LuGRE would demonstrate acquiring and tracking signals from both the U.S. GPS and European Union Galileo GNSS constellations during transit to the Moon, during lunar orbit, and finally for up to two weeks on the lunar surface itself…

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