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Lunar Development: Recently there are multiple companies and countries preparing to develop the resources of the Moon. So far, now being October 2025, several moon landers have tried to land with varying success. Looking back to the earliest attempts by the Sovjet Union and the USA one thing becomes clear; landing is risky. The simple truth is that only some kind of remote sensing from the lander is ultimately being used. Finding the height of a fast-moving lander has been challenging, partly because the upper layers of the surface can be some kind of rubble, or can be more solid. This fools some technology into thinking it is at a different height. Furthermore landing from orbiting the Moon first means a rapid flight over the surface while coming down. The Moon has many craters, but they can be confusing, messing up visible positional tracking. This is a cause for concern with the planned human landing attempts.
A good solution would be to have beacons placed on the surface, while the addition of a GPS-analog for the Moon would be desirable as well. Beacons can be passive, i.e., reflect certain frequencies of light or radio, or active, activating a beacon for approaching landers to guide them to their desired landing spot. Triangulation of signals from multiple beacons would seem desirable. This proposed system would make human spaceflight to the Moon safer, and reduce possible losses of lander or use from its instrumentation.
Placement of beacons does not require first to orbit the Moon. A direct approach and impact of the rugged instrument and its passive reflective materials costs less and has been used in the early USA Moon missions. Typically, the mass such an impactor would be of order 1 kg for launch to the Moon plus what is required for a transfer vehicle to bring the impactor from the Earth to the Moon.
Instrumentation for such a device was developed in studies over a decade ago, and benefit also from experience in the defense sector. The main difference is that these beacons primarily are radio beacons, though some seismological device can easily be accomodated, those being small and providing further benefit in discovering the resources below the surface.
Lately I have become concerned that the current aim for going to the Moon is non sustainable. This is why I am starting a company to work on Moon beacons. This is obviously beneficial and once these are working, services can be provided to landings on the Moon. With reduced risks, insurance will be better defined and it is my belief that the costs of the system can be recovered in a reasonable amount of time. It will also provide the initial infrastructure and any attempts to build underground will need the knowledge the seismic data provide.
My recent history: From 2007 I worked on the operations and the calibration of the very successful Swift UVOT instrument, where all major items of the calibration of the UVOT grisms have been completed. However, the Swift spacecraft is doomed to re-entry sometime in 2026, though NASA has contracted for an orbital boost to extend the life of the Swift mission.
For more UVOT details, consult the
My other interests focus only weakly on a specific kind of astronomical object because I find the physics of the processes of energetic events fascinating. And thus I have studied a range of objects like solar flares, neutron star mergers, stars exploding in a nova or supernova, and the like.
Besides the science, I have always felt that a contribution to the infrastructure of science is important. That has taken the form of advocating a discovery service for science data (Master Directory (1990-1992), managing and reorganisation of the Astronomical Data Center at NASA Goddard (1993), working on the engineering development of several Earth remote rensing missions (1994-2003) which hopefully contributes to solve the climate crisis, and finally the in-flight instrument calibration (SoHO GIS, 2005-2006; Swift UVOT 2007-now).
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