Lunar HyTI Is Ready to Fly on Altus-1
Lunar HyTI, a thermal infrared hyperspectral imager from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, has passed environmental testing and is ready to fly. It will fly aboard Altus-1, the first satellite in Intuitive Machines' lunar communications and navigation constellation. Launch is planned for the first quarter of 2027.
From an elliptical orbit of roughly 2,000 × 20,000 km, Lunar HyTI is designed to map molecular water and lunar mineralogy, including on the farside, and to detect infrared flashes from small meteorite impacts on the Moon. It covers 4.5–11.4 µm with 0.25 mrad spatial resolution, about 500 m per pixel at 2,000 km.
The instrument is a close derivative of the University of Hawaiʻi HyTI instrument developed for NASA's Earth Science Technology Office InVEST program, which HSFL flew on the HyTI CubeSat.
The Lunar HyTI team includes P. G. Lucey and M. Nunes of UH Mānoa, colleagues at Intuitive Machines, and C. I. Honniball of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The project is hosted by the Hawaiʻi Institute of Geophysics and Planetology and supported by Intuitive Machines of Houston, Texas.
