Robin McNeill said yesterday he and his team were putting the final touches on the technology necessary to provide the communications for a soft moon landing using a 30m-long antenna they recently bought, which is situated at Warkworth Space Centre, 90km from Auckland.
Space Ops will be helping United States company Intuitive Machines with the launch of its lunar lander from a Falcon 9 rocket, operated by Elon Musk’s Space X.
The mission aims to find water on the moon, and if everything goes as planned, it could provide a stepping stone for further deep space exploration.
Speaking to the Otago Daily Times yesterday, Mr McNeill said his team were both excited and nervous, as it was an "ambitious mission".
"I had my first good sleep last night for the first time in four weeks.
"We’ve had to make sure that it is all working, but we now feel very confident that we will be ready."
Mr McNeill said for this moment to come, he and his team had had to carry out a lot of hard work, including a "complete upgrade" of the antenna so it was able to transmit as well as receive data. They also had to install new modems, transmitters and modulators, to ensure accuracy, as well as ensure the internet was completely secure, to avoid any hacker attack.
They were now working to fix a power cable, which he had been assured would be sorted in time.
Mr McNeill said Space Ops’ role in the mission was to provide communication between the client, based in United States, to both the Falcon 9 spacecraft and the lander, which would carry a Micro-Nova hopper that would hopefully be landing on the moon.
"The antenna has to point to a very, very high accuracy."
He said his team would be in action from about two hours after the launch, which was "shortly after separation from the Falcon 9".
"Then important parameters get passed from SpaceX to the customer, confirming the launch, the direction and velocity of the spacecraft, and then they have to download that information from the spacecraft, do calculations and then transmit it back to the spacecraft within four hours, as it needs to do a lunar insertion manoeuvre or burn manoeuvre.
"If that doesn’t work, they go somewhere in outer space."
After that, Space Ops would keep receiving and transmitting data from the spacecraft and the lander to the client, until the end of the mission, he said.
He could not say exactly when it would land on the moon, but it would take a couple of days.
Mr McNeill said he was hoping everything would go well and according to plan, as this would be a huge milestone not only for his company but for the country.
"Once we know we can do the moon, we will go to interplanetary missions — Mars and Jupiter ...
"We’re not shooting for just the moon. We’re shooting much, much further out."
