“On Earth we can use GNSS signals to navigate in everything from smartphones to airplanes,” Kevin Coggins, deputy associate administrator for NASA’s SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) Program, said in a statement. “Now, LuGRE shows us that we can successfully acquire and track GNSS signals at the Moon.”

Learn about the LuGRE experiment by NASA and the Italian Space Agency involving Earth-based navigation on the surface of the Moon.

The new milestone means NASA’s exploration missions could benefit from these signals to accurately and autonomously determine their position, velocity and time.