Interstellar Voyager: NASA’s Blue Ghost Spacecraft Captures Earth’s GPS Signal from 400,000 Kilometers Away

NASA is currently on a mission to send a spacecraft to explore the moon, named Blue Ghost, which is currently on its way and scheduled to land on March 2, 2025. Manufactured and operated by Firefly Aerospace, the goal of this craft is to deploy 10 scientific instruments on the lunar surface to gather research data.

While the spacecraft is en route to the moon, one of the scientific instruments already in operation is the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE). Its task is to detect satellite navigation signals in the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), which includes GPS (U.S.), Galileo (Europe), GLONASS (Russia), and BeiDou (China), to determine if signals reach the lunar surface or not.

The latest development reveals that LuGRE is capable of capturing GNSS satellite signals orbiting Earth even at a distance of up to 246,000 miles (approximately 400,000 kilometers), suggesting future navigation systems could rely on GNSS signals even on the lunar surface.

LuGRE is a collaboration between NASA and the Italian Space Agency, and once Blue Ghost lands, it will continue to capture GNSS signals from the lunar surface for the following 14 days.

TLDR: NASA’s Blue Ghost mission aims to explore the moon with scientific instruments like LuGRE, which can capture GNSS signals even from Earth’s orbit, paving the way for potential lunar navigation systems.