Within the next decade, the US plans to return to the moon and perform new science missions and moon walk explorations. One of the lessons learned in previous Apollo missions was the difficulty in performing rover and astronaut excursions in the rugged, bright-white terrain of the moon; it is extremely easy for astronauts to lose their way in this featureless environment filled with valleys, hills, and craters. Earth location systems such as GPS are not available on the moon and are too costly to build. However, NASA is extremely interested in testing a new “bread crumb” technique for tracking astronauts that travel through regions around their lunar lander. Much like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs, an astronaut on excursion would drop very small, disposable RF identification tags that operate on the principle of backscatter modulation. The astronaut’s suit would contain a low-powered reader that could measure reflected tag data and coherent signal strength (amplitude and strength) in proximity of these tags as well as a signal sent from the lunar lander, using this information to navigate the lunar terrain.

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