A return to the Moon promises scientific breakthroughs and new commercial opportunities. But such a return will require new types of instruments to guide, study, and explore. With decades of flight heritage and expertise in camera technology, Redwire is well positioned to be a leader in developing new camera instruments for navigation, research, and other applications. Redwire is proud to be collaborating with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory to develop a small, lightweight, and low-power camera that will provide data on the composition of rocks and soils on the lunar surface.
This new instrument, called the Mahina Color Camera (MahinaCam), is being developed under NASA’s Development and Advancement of Lunar Instrumentation (DALI) program. DALI’s goal is to promote the development of instruments that could be used in future NASA flights and incorporated into various lunar projects.
Commercial and scientific presence on the Moon will depend on access to useful minerals, making MahinaCam an important enabling technology for lunar permanence.
Named after the Hawaiian word for Moon (Mahina), MahinaCam builds on Redwire’s camera system expertise. The camera uses proven design based on off-the-shelf hardware and is intended to be a low-cost and low-resource instrument that can be used in a variety of applications. MahinaCam could be used on landers and rovers to collect data on the iron and titanium content and degree of space weathering of materials at a landing site, distant locations, or along rover traverses.
MahinaCam will achieve this through the use of specialized wavelength filters to collect multispectral images in the visible to near-infrared. The filters in conventional red-green-blue imagers are broad and overlap, limiting their ability to determine lunar composition. MahinaCam will use three filters that are narrower and set at specific wavelengths useful for mapping lunar surface composition and optical properties.
MahinaCam uses a simple design with no moving parts and can use onboard image-processing techniques to improve performance in low-light and high-contrast conditions such as those found on the Moon. Future versions of MahinaCam could also use wavelength filters tailored to conduct science at specific locations, such as polar regions, or sites of volcanism.
The development of MahinaCam adds to Redwire’s expansive heritage in space camera systems. Redwire’s camera technology has been used to provide space domain awareness capability for civil, commercial and national security space mission applications, including machine vision, optical navigation, science, remote sensing, photogrammetry, inspection, video monitoring and mission documentation.
Redwire cameras recently supported the Intuitive Machine’s historic lunar landing for the IM-1 mission. The Orion Camera System, developed by Redwire in partnership with Lockheed Martin, launched on the Artemis I mission and will be onboard future Artemis missions III-V. Learn more here.
