MSolo Prepared For Flight To The Moon

Engineers and technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida install the radiator for the Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations (MSolo) instrument inside the Space Station Processing Facility on Sept. 25, 2020.
MSolo will help analyze the chemical makeup of landing sites on the Moon, as well as study water on the lunar surface. The radiator will help keep the instrument’s temperature stable in the extreme heat and cold it will encounter.

MSolo instruments are scheduled to launch on multiple robotic missions as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), with the first of these missions exploring Lacus Mortis, a large crater on the near side of the Moon, beginning in 2021.

MSolo also will be one of three instruments on the agency’s water-hunting Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, VIPER, scheduled to launch to the Moon’s South Pole in late 2023.

KSC-20200925-PH-GEB02_0117 Photo credit: NASA/Glenn Benson Larger image