Technology Report

June 2026

LunaSAR

ADELAIDE, Australia — A distress beacon has always been a shout. It cannot hear back. In the June 2026 Journal of Space Safety Engineering, researchers reported a prototype that talked — voice and text — on the same 406 MHz channel rescue agencies already use. Rice et al., JSSE 13(2), call it the first demonstration of that two-way traffic on the allocated distress band. The radio waveform is named Beagle. The project is LunaSAR.

406 MHz is the international distress frequency for personal locator beacons, EPIRBs, and aircraft emergency locators. Cospas-Sarsat is the satellite system that listens. Today’s beacons send a one-way SOS. LunaSAR is a research attempt to put a conversation on that same channel.

The hardware comes from Safety from Space, an Australian satellite-communications company. SmartSat CRC says the prototype was built with NASA’s Search and Rescue Laboratory. SmartSat calls LunaSAR a geolocation and austere-communications system for stranded astronauts. Safety from Space says it has been developing Beagle since 2018, on small, low-power radios meant for hard environments, drawing on mobile satellite research, U.S. Department of Defense tracking work, and Cospas-Sarsat.

SmartSat reported a demonstration co-funded by the South Australian Government through the South Australia Space Industry Centre. The Australian Space Agency supported the event through Australian astronaut GPCAPT Katherine Bennell-Pegg. RFShop Australia, a hardware partner, dates the live field test to August 28, 2025, at Lot Fourteen in Adelaide. SmartSat says Safety from Space showed simultaneous voice and text through modifications to the second-generation Cospas-Sarsat beacon standard, using operational search-and-rescue frameworks coordinated with the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.

The June paper reports that trial. The published abstract says the work is part of an effort toward standardizing LunaSAR as a possible piece of LunaNet, NASA’s planned lunar communications network. Test cases, the authors write, were based on inputs from the NASA Search and Rescue Office, which they say is observing the project. South Australia’s remote terrain stood in for a lunar analog. The demonstration used low-power radios tested with Galileo satellites that already serve the International Cospas-Sarsat Programme. That two-way claim is the paper’s. The full methods sit behind a paywall.

NASA’s Search and Rescue office at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, describes LunaSAR as a lunar concept. On its Goddard search-and-rescue page, NASA says the work extends Earth practice to the lunar surface and would use LunaNet as a backbone for rescue data. A 2021 NASA abstract by Cody Kelly put the end goal as timely distress indication for lunar-surface users, with performance modeled on Cospas-Sarsat. When fielded, that abstract said, LunaSAR would be the first dedicated search-and-rescue notification system on another celestial body. That is a research claim, not an operational service.

The satellites that already listen for 406 MHz beacons are a different project, MEOSAR, the medium-orbit layer of Cospas-Sarsat. LunaSAR is a beacon and waveform that tries to put two-way traffic on that channel. Cospas-Sarsat’s June 2026 supplement describes a separate two-way service still under development for second-generation beacons: canned answers to formal questions. That planned service is not a voice circuit, and Cospas-Sarsat does not present it as fielded.

There is no catalog to buy a LunaSAR beacon. NASA and SmartSat have said the research is also meant to help first responders on Earth. It remains a prototype.