NASA Funds 'Slingshot' Concept to Scout Minerals on Moon, Asteroids and Phobos

NASA has funded an early-stage concept called "Interworld Slingshot Resource Surveys" that aims to bring "Landsat-style mineral intelligence" to other worlds, including the moon — mirroring the orbiting Landsat satellites that have charted minerals and climate change on Earth for more than 50 years. The project, nicknamed "Slingshot," received a Phase 1 grant of up to $175,000 over nine months from NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program.

The concept envisions a small spacecraft flying from world to world — scanning destinations such as the moon, a near-Earth asteroid, or the Mars moon Phobos — using Raman spectroscopy, the same technique NASA's Perseverance rover uses up close on Mars to identify minerals and water by shining a laser at a target and analysing the reflected light.

Principal investigator Pablo Sobron, a research scientist at the SETI Institute, said the study aims to test whether useful Raman measurements can be made from roughly 30 to 50 km (19 to 31 miles) away — far beyond his own earlier long-distance tests, which reached about 120 metres (393 feet). Raman scattering is faint even up close: the project team says only about one photon in 10 trillion is Raman-scattered.

Sobron said the concept is meant to help future missions avoid costly failures: "Land in the wrong place and you can lose an entire exploration program or a company, and nobody has enough money to keep sending spacecraft and hoping for the best." NASA is aiming to put a crewed moon base on the lunar surface in the 2030s as the US seeks access to helium-3 and other lunar minerals ahead of China.

The Phase 1 funding will be used to study the photons, lasers, pointing systems, and spacecraft propulsion and orbits the concept would need; the project's next step would be to compete for a more substantial two-year Phase 2 NIAC grant.