A 2023 lander in the moon’s Mare Crisium will carry the first GNSS receiver to that planet’s surface: the Navigation Early Investigation on Lunar surface (NEIL) receiver with software-defined radio (SDR) technology. The receiver will spring from agreements between the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the Italian firm Qascom srl.

The Qascom receiver will be part of the on-board payload of the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE), defined in the ASI / NASA agreement, which aims to develop an activity in a lunar and cislunar environment. LuGRE will fly on one of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) missions. The mission will also bring 9 other scientific and technological experiments to the Moon. Scheduled for the end of 2023, it will be launched with a Falcon 9 carrier from the Space X company.