ESA's Lunar Link is ready for space, but has no ride yet

Europe has finished building a piece of Moon hardware that currently has nowhere to go. ESA's Lunar Link is a telecommunications system designed to connect an orbiting station with explorers on the lunar surface. It has completed its last major integration and testing campaign at Thales Alenia Space in Cannes, France, ESA announced on Tuesday.

Lunar Link was meant to fly on NASA's HALO habitation module as part of the Lunar Gateway. NASA decided earlier this year to pause work on the Gateway. At that point, ESA says, Lunar Link was only three months from completion. The test campaign was already running and the test facilities were booked, so ESA and its industrial partners decided to finish the job.

The balloon trick

Lunar Link's antennas are designed to unfold in lunar orbit, where they'll be weightless. To recreate that on Earth, engineers lifted the antenna with balloons about four metres across during the deployment test. In the end-to-end demo, NASA brought racks of equipment that pretended to be a user on the Moon. ESA says the system "performs exactly as intended".

What happens next

ESA is now studying how Lunar Link could fly on its own. Mounted on a spacecraft with an extra antenna to talk to Earth, it could become an independent communications relay for future Moon missions by ESA and its partners. The studies will look at spacecraft designs, orbits, schedules, links with ESA's Moonlight lunar navigation and communications programme, and room for extra science payloads.

The system was built by Thales Alenia Space teams in France, Belgium, Spain and Italy, along with MDA in the UK and SENER in Spain.

It's been a busy week for planetary exploration. Japan's MMX probe, which carries ESA communications hardware, launched to Mars's moon Phobos. Earlier this month, the Griffin-1 Moon lander passed its tests at JPL.