Lunar Ultraviolet Cosmic Imager (LUCI) is a small planned telescope that will be landed on the

Moon The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite. It is the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System and the largest and most massive relative to its parent planet, with a diameter about one-quarter that of Earth (comparable to the width of ...

to scan the sky in near UV wavelengths. It is a technology demonstrator developed by the

Indian Institute of Astrophysics The Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), with its headquarters in Bengaluru,is an autonomous Research Institute wholly financed by the department of Science and Technology, Government of India. IIA conducts research primarily in the areas of ...

,"Prospect for UV observations from the Moon". Safonova, M., Mathew, J., Mohan, R. et al. Astrophys. Space Sci. (2014) 353: 329. "Prospect for UV observations from the Moon. II. Instrumental design of an ultraviolet imager LUCI". Mathew, J., Prakash, A., Sarpotdar, M. et al. Astrophys. Space Sci. (2017) 362: 37. and it was planned to be one of several small payloads to be deployed by the commercial ''Z-01'' lander developed by

TeamIndus TeamIndus (incorporated as Axiom Research LabsCommercial Lunar Payload Services Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) is a NASA program to contract transportation services able to send small robotic landers and rovers to the Moon's south polar region mostly with the goals of scouting for lunar resources, testing in situ ...

(CLPS). On 29 July 2019 OrbitBeyond announced that it will drop out of the CLPS contract with NASA, meaning that the 2020 launch was canceled and it is unknown whether the mission will ever take place.

Science objectives

The science objectives of LUCI telescope are primarily to search for transient astronomic events such as

supernova A supernova is a powerful and luminous explosion of a star. It has the plural form supernovae or supernovas, and is abbreviated SN or SNe. This transient astronomical event occurs during the last evolutionary stages of a massive star or when ...

nova A nova (plural novae or novas) is a transient astronomical event that causes the sudden appearance of a bright, apparently "new" star (hence the name "nova", which is Latin for "new") that slowly fades over weeks or months. Causes of the dramati ...

e, tidal disruption events by massive

black hole A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravitation, gravity is so strong that nothing, including light or other Electromagnetic radiation, electromagnetic waves, has enough energy to escape it. The theory of general relativity predicts t ...

s, and more exotic energetic sources such as

superluminous supernova A super-luminous supernova (SLSN, plural super luminous supernovae or SLSNe) is a type of stellar explosion with a luminosity 10 or more times higher than that of standard supernovae. Like supernovae, SLSNe seem to be produced by several mech ...

e and flashes from cosmic collisions which can be very energetic on all scales. LUCI will also look for faint

asteroid An asteroid is a minor planet of the inner Solar System. Sizes and shapes of asteroids vary significantly, ranging from 1-meter rocks to a dwarf planet almost 1000 km in diameter; they are rocky, metallic or icy bodies with no atmosphere. ...

s and

comet A comet is an icy, small Solar System body that, when passing close to the Sun, warms and begins to release gases, a process that is called outgassing. This produces a visible atmosphere or coma, and sometimes also a tail. These phenomena ar ...

s in the

Solar System The Solar SystemCapitalization of the name varies. The International Astronomical Union, the authoritative body regarding astronomical nomenclature, specifies capitalizing the names of all individual astronomical objects but uses mixed "Solar S ...

, especially for

near-Earth object A near-Earth object (NEO) is any small Solar System body whose orbit brings it into proximity with Earth. By convention, a Solar System body is a NEO if its closest approach to the Sun (perihelion) is less than 1.3 astronomical units (AU). ...

s (NEO) and

potentially hazardous object A potentially hazardous object (PHO) is a near-Earth object – either an asteroid or a comet – with an orbit that can make close approaches to the Earth and is large enough to cause significant regional damage in the event of impact. They ar ...

s. The aims are focused on UV sources not accessible by the more sensitive large space missions.

Overview

The Earth's atmosphere absorbs and scatters UV photons, preventing observations of the active Universe. Placing a telescope on the surface of the Moon is advantageous because of its absence of atmosphere and ionosphere offers an unobstructed view of the space in all wavelengths. The Moon surface provides not just a stable platform, but an inexpensive and long-term access to observations in wavelengths not normally used by large orbital telescope missions. The only UV astronomical observations from the Moon to date were made by

Apollo 16 Apollo 16 (April 1627, 1972) was the tenth crewed mission in the United States Apollo space program, administered by NASA, and the fifth and penultimate to land on the Moon. It was the second of Apollo's " J missions", with an extended sta ...

team in 1972 and theLunar-based Ultraviolet telescope aboard the Chang'e 3 lunar lander in 2018. LUCI project started in 2013 and is funded by India's Department of Science and Technology. The telescope team is headed by Jayant Murthy. The telescope has been completed as of March 2019, and was awaiting integration to the ''Z-01'' lander. It was planned be launched in Q3 2020Z-01 Lander
Gunter Dirk Krebs, ''Gunter's Space Page''. Accessed on 17 June 2019. and land at

Mare Imbrium Mare Imbrium (Latin ''imbrium'', the "Sea of Showers" or "Sea of Rains", "Sea of Tears") is a vast lava plain within the Imbrium Basin on the Moon and is one of the larger craters in the Solar System. The Imbrium Basin formed from the colli ...

(29.52º N 25.68º W). The optical system is a two-spherical mirror configuration and a double-pass corrector lens. Its primary lens is all-spherical measuring 80 mm transmitting light through the system to a photon-counting

charge-coupled device A charge-coupled device (CCD) is an integrated circuit containing an array of linked, or coupled, capacitors. Under the control of an external circuit, each capacitor can transfer its electric charge to a neighboring capacitor. CCD sensors are a ...

(CCD) detector which is sensitive to ultraviolet wavelengths. The detector is an 8 mm UV-sensitive CCD with the response between 200 - 900 nm, so the engineers placed a solar blind filter before the CCD to restrict the bandpass to 200 - 320 nm. LUCI is planned to be mostly contained within the lander, and it will be lowered back into its storage bay during the cold lunar nights. The baseline for LUCI's operation is "a few months".

References

{{Space observatories Ultraviolet astronomy Ultraviolet telescopes Space telescopes Missions to the Moon

Science objectives

Overview

See also

References