Blue Ghost's using GPS on the moon due to radio hams

An interesting little story showed up today on QRZ.com, a ham radio site.  It references one of the ham radio satellites called Amsat Oscar-40 or AO-40 and how radio amateurs determined how to use GPS from the moon.

Breaking down that bunch of new terms, Amsat is the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation, a group of volunteers who have been helping get amateur radio satellites into orbit since the 1960s.  Amsat was formed in the District of Columbia in 1969 as an educational organization.  Oscar is the acronym from "orbiting satellite carrying amateur radio." Project Oscar launched the first ham satellite on December 12, 1961, barely four years after the launch of Russia’s first Sputnik.

American ham Frank Bauer, KA3HDO, convinced NASA to sponsor the first experiment on the AO-40 mission.  There is documentation of those results (pdf alert) searchable online.  You'll see that the document linked to there is dated October of 2001.  AO-40 was in a group of satellites that Amsat was developing to fly in orbits that took them farther from Earth than earlier satellites, but was retired in 2003, due to some hardware failure. 

For his work Frank Bauer was awarded the Dayton Hamvention's Amateur of the Year in 2017. 

Amateur Radio on the International Space Station International Chair Frank Bauer, KA3HDO, is Hamvention’s 2017 Amateur of the Year. Bauer has been a driving force behind the program since its inception. He also serves as AMSAT-NA Vice President for Human Spaceflight.

In the mid-1990s, Bauer proposed an experiment to have the high-Earth orbit (HEO) AMSAT Phase 3D satellite (AO-40) measure the signal strength of the GPS satellite constellation. The AO-40 experiment subsequently has been cited often in aerospace literature, as it remained the most comprehensive above-the-constellation data source for nearly a decade and led to changes in the system’s specifications and applications. The results of the AO-40 experiment jump started a game-changing transformation in navigation at HEO/GEO altitudes, enabling new and exciting missions in these orbits.

Frank KA3HDO is also named as a consultant on the international team that developed the current Moon lander package named LuGRE.

LuGRE (from "Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment" and pronounced like luger) has been credited with getting GNSS navigation to Blue Ghost on the moon. GNSS refers to the Global Navigation Satellite System, and LuGRE is only working with the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS) and European Union’s Galileo.  The receiver on blue ghost was developed by Qascom, an Italian aerospace company.

The goal of the experiment is to access this extensive system from the moon for position, navigation and timing (PNT).  The issue of timing on the moon is something we talked about almost a year ago, April of '24. 

The joint NASA, Italian Space Agency, Qascom, and PoliTO LuGRE team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Image uncredited on QRZ.

Much like Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander itself, LuGRE is part of NASA's CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) program.  A short (1-1/2 minute) video about the concept has been posted for a couple of months.

Personally, ham radio satellites have been "up there" for my entire life as a ham, and while I've listened to the downlinks a few times, including from hams on the Space Shuttles long before the ISS and its permanent ham station, I've never had a contact through the satellites.  Whatever you're into.