Lunar Neutrals Telescope onboard Turkish Lunar Mission: Coordination of the scientific observation and data distribution

The Turkish Lunar Mission (TLM) is the first Turkish mission to the Moon, being led by the Space Technologies Research Institute of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. Turkey launched the ambitious national lunar and planetary exploration program and set the Moon as the first target.

While the primary goal of the TLM is to develop core technologies required for future space explorations, several Turkish and international scientific payloads were selected to be onboard the TLM for scientific observations.

The launch was originally planned in 2024, but postponed to 2026 due to a procurement issue of spacecraft components, resulting from external circumstances.

The mission is currently in Phase-C, and the Phase-D will start by the end of 2024.As a Swedish contribution to the TLM, IRF successfully obtained an opportunity to get our instrument, Lunar Neutrals Telescope (LNT), onboard.

The LNT is designed to measure energetic neutral atoms generated at the Moon surface from the orbiting spacecraft around the Moon and make a global map of plasma precipitation onto the Moon surface. LNT is expected to answer some fundamental scientific questions of the Moon.

There are three major scientific objectives for LNT observations: (A) To investigate the structure (shape) of mini-magnetosphere created by lunar magnetic anomalies and its response to the solar wind, (B) to search for volatile-rich areas on the Moon’s surface with the special focus on the permanently shadowed regions, and (C) to investigate the formation and maintenance processes of the lunar exosphere.The Design of the LNT is based on the successful predecessor CENA/SARA sensor on Chandrayaan-1 and is updated to achieve unprecedentedly high angular resolution, which is approximately factor of 7 higher than the predecessor.

Since IRF has extensive experience in the development of similar instruments, we do not foresee any technical difficulties to build the LNT.

With a financial support from SNSA, the LNT engineering model was successfully developed in 2023 and delivered to Turkey in 2024.

Development of the flight model has been kicked off in 2024 and its final delivery is expected in the middle of 2025.One of the biggest challenges to move the project forward with the Turkish team is to set up the common basis for the collaboration with countries which we have never worked with.

This is of particular importance in scientific collaborations because Turkey is less experienced country in terms of scientific space missions.

To overcome this initial barrier, a science working team (SWT) consisting of Turkish and international scientists was established to advice on all aspects of the mission affecting the scientific performance.

The SWT is also creating completely new opportunities to collaborate with Turkish scientists even outside of the TLM project.

The SWT meeting is planned on a regular basis and we realized that IRF’s participation in the SWT meetings is crucial for the success of our project.This application requests a funding to support the coordination of scientific observations made by LNT through participation in the SWT meetings.

Since the need of this activity is newly identified, it is not covered by the existing SNSA funding (2022-00089), which supports the LNT hardware-related activities. Development cost of the LNT is not sought by this application.