In this visualization, the LEXI instrument is shown onboard Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, which will deliver 10 Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) payloads to the Moon. Credit Firefly Aerospace
To better understand how Earth is shielded from solar radiation, NASA is sending LEXI, the Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager to the Moon as part of its Artemis campaign to capture the first global images of the planet’s magnetic field.
Imagine a camera on the Moon, focused back on Earth, capturing images of our planet’s invisible shield. That’s the mission of LEXI, the Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager. Launching no earlier than mid-January from Kennedy Space Center on Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Lander as part of NASA’s CLPS program, LEXI will spend six days observing X-rays emanating from Earth’s magnetosphere. This unique vantage point will provide a comprehensive understanding of how this protective barrier responds to space weather – the dynamic conditions driven by the Sun – and how it sometimes allows solar particles to break through, creating the aurora and potentially disrupting our technology. LEXI is one of ten payloads on this lunar delivery.
“We’re trying to get this big picture of Earth’s space environment,” said Brian Walsh, a space physicist at Boston University and LEXI’s principal investigator. “A lot of physics can be esoteric or difficult to follow without years of specific training, but this will be science that you can see.”
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What LEXI will see is the low-energy X-rays that form when a stream of particles from the Sun, called the solar wind, slams into Earth’s magnetic field. This happens at the edge of the magnetosphere, called the magnetopause. Researchers have recently been able to detect these X-rays in a patchwork of observations from other satellites and instruments. From the vantage point of the Moon, however, the whole magnetopause will be in LEXI’s field of view.
The team back on Earth will be working around the clock to track how the magnetosphere expands, contracts, and changes shape in response to the strength of the solar wind.
“We expect to see the magnetosphere breathing out and breathing in, for the first time,” said Hyunju Connor, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the NASA lead for LEXI. “When the solar wind is very strong, the magnetosphere will shrink and push backward toward Earth, and then expand when the solar wind weakens.”
