The lack of information about human-made objects orbiting the Moon poses many risks for future lunar missions.
using telescopes we built to track objects in cislunar space. With both the U.S. and China planning to build lunar bases in the coming years, falling debris could become a real threat to human life and infrastructure on the Moon.If you want to prevent the Moon from becoming a cosmic landfill, you need to be able to track cislunar space junk. But doing so is challenging even on a good day for two main reasons: distance and light.
Light presents another challenge. Just like the Moon itself, the brightness of an object in cislunar space depends on how much sunlight the object reflects. During a crescent moon, lunar debris appears dim and low in the evening sky, making it hard to find. During a full moon, the same objects are high in the sky and brighter due to more sunlight hitting them, but they blend in with the bright glare that surrounds a full moon.
The first object we tracked was Chang’e 5, China’s first lunar sample return mission. The large rocket launched on Nov. 23, 2020, headed toward the Moon. Despite the powerful lunar glare, my students and I were able to trackto a distance of 12,354 miles from the Moon, deep into the Cone of Shame. With this success, we started tracking newly launched cislunar payloads and adding them to our nascent catalog.
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