Lunar Trailblazer, NASA’s mission to understand lunar water and the Moon’s water cycle, is one step closer to launching next year. Earlier this month, @NASAJPL delivered the High-resolution Volatiles and Minerals Moon Mapper (HVM3) to @LockheedMartin in Colorado, and the teams integrated it with the small satellite. HVM3 will detect and map water on the Moon’s surface to determine its abundance, location, form, and how it changes over time. This information will provide data on the lunar water cycle and help inform future human missions as to where supplies of water may be found and extracted as a resource. The other instrument on Lunar Trailblazer, the Lunar Thermal Mapper infrared multispectral imager, is being developed by the University of Oxford in the U.K. and is scheduled for delivery and integration in early 2023. Lunar Trailblazer will launch as a secondary payload on the second lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines, called IM-2. That launch, which will also carry @NASA’s Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 subsurface ice drill, is scheduled for no earlier than mid-2023. Image description: Engineers work on the JPL-developed High-resolution Volatiles and Minerals Moon Mapper (HVM3) for NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft in a clean room at Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, shortly after the instrument was delivered in December 2022. Credit: Lockheed Martin Space #Artemis #Satellite #NASA #NASAJPL #STEM #Moon #LunarMission