page_title: Commercial Lunar Mission Support Services
section_title: Overview
hierarchical_section_title: Commercial Lunar Mission Support Services / Overview
caption_attribution_description: English: South pole Aitken basin on the moon, from JAXA's Kaguya data. Viewed at -45 degrees. The black ring is an old approximation; the elliptical purple and grey rings trace the inner and outer rings per [1] (fig. 2 from Garrick-Bethell and Zuber, 2009, doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2009.05.032)
context_page_description: The Commercial Lunar Mission Support Services, also called Lunar Mission Support Services is a collaboration between Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd, Goonhilly Earth Station and the European Space Agency to develop a lunar telecommunications and navigation infrastructure to support lunar scientific and economic development.
  The collaboration agreement, announced on 17 April 2018, proposes a step-wise approach to implementing a sustainable commercial service to support both orbiting and landed lunar assets.
context_section_description: Dozens of different commercial, private and public missions to the Moon are planned for the coming decades, so the Commercial Lunar Mission Support Services (CLMSS) project intends to provide a sustainable communications and navigation infrastructure. The commercial collaboration includes an upgrade of the Goonhilly Earth Station for commercial cis-lunar telecommunications, and the development of their first orbiter called the Lunar Pathfinder that is proposed to be launched in 2022 or 2023. While the signed agreement covers missions to the Moon, there is the potential to apply a similar service for Mars in the future.
caption: Topographic map of the South Pole–Aitken basin based on Kaguya orbiter data. Red represents high elevation, purple represents low elevation. The purple and grey elliptical rings trace the inner and outer walls of the basin.
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