ROME (ITALPRESS) – “Italy once again plays a leading role with the first entirely Made in Italy instrument close to landing on the moon, designed to test deep space connections.” So said Minister of Enterprise and Made in Italy, Adolfo Urso, the authority delegated to space and aerospace policies, commenting on the launch of LuGRE (Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment), the next-generation satellite navigation receiver resulting from the collaboration between the Italian Space Agency and Nasa. “With this frontier and challenging experiment, which will provide a significant contribution to the preparation of future lunar missions,” Urso added, “we open what promises to be a golden year for Italy in space. The innovative satellite device, designed and built by Qascom on behalf of Asi, was launched at 7:11 a.m. (Italian time) from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. It will land on lunar soil in early March and will aim to receive and send signals from GPS and Galileo radionavigation satellites coming from Earth and from devices in orbit. Today’s mission follows by a few hours the successful launch of the Pathfinder Hawk for Earth Observation satellite test of the Iride constellation, made by the Italian company Argotec, which took off last night at 8:09 p.m. (Italian time) from the California base in Vandenberg. An operation, this one, that will be the forerunner to Iride, the Earth observation program carried out by Esa in collaboration with Asi wanted by the Italian government and financed with Pnrr funds, and to future international lunar missions. (ITALPRESS).
-Photo: Italian Space Agency-
Italy’s first satellite receiver launched
