The Lunar IceCube EM-1 Mission: Prospecting for Lunar Water Ice
Abstract
Lunar IceCube, a 6U CubeSat designed to prospect for water in solid (ice), liquid, and vapor forms and other lunar volatiles (i.e. OH, H2S, CO2 and CH4) from a low-perigee, highly inclined lunar orbit, was selected by NASA's Advanced Exploration Systems (AES) for a flight opportunity on Exploration Mission -1 (EM-1). The mission is a partnership between Morehead State University, NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center (GSFC), the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and the Busek Space Propulsion Company. Lunar IceCube will be deployed by the Space Launch System (SLS) and uses an innovative RF Ion engine to achieve lunar capture and a science orbit (inertially locked, highly elliptical, 100 km periapsis) to investigate the distribution of water (water ice, water vapor, water components) and other volatiles. These volatile distributions will be investigated contextually, as a function of time of day, latitude, and regolith composition in the context of mineralogy. IceCube will include the Broadband InfraRed Compact High Resolution Exploration Spectrometer (BIRCHES), developed for CubeSats by GSFC- a compact version of the successful volatile-seeking OSIRIS-REx Visible and near-IR Spectrometer (OVIRS) and New Horizons Ralph instruments. The mission will address NASA Strategic Knowledge Gaps related to lunar volatile distribution, and will complement the scientific work of Lunar Flashlight and LunaH-Map by focusing on the abundance, location and transportation physics of water ice on the lunar surface at a variety of latitudes, thus not restricted to permanently shadowed regions (PSRs). IceCube incorporates radiation-hardened subsystems, the JPL Iris transponder, and a high power (120W) solar array. The RF Ion engine (Busek BIT-3 Iodine engine) generates significant delta-v (> 1.2 kms-1 for the 14 kg spacecraft) and is one of the primary enabling technologies that will make this and other interplanetary CubeSat science missions feasible. Experts at GSFC are providing trajectory design and modeling, navigation and tracking support, and orbital products.The primary science objectives of the Lunar IceCube mission are to enable spectral determination of the composition and distribution of volatiles in the lunar regolith as a function of time of day, latitude, regolith age and composition and to provide a geological context for those measurements through spectral determination of mineral components. Although previous missions (e.g. Clementine, Chandrayaan-1, and LRO/LCROSS) discovered various signatures of OH/H2O, they were not optimized for volatile characterization. BIRCHES is designed with the high spectral resolution (5 nm) and wavelength range (1 to 4 _m) needed to fully characterize water and other volatiles, and to distinguish forms of water, including ice. Because the emphasis was on maximizing coverage during the nominal mission, even LRO was not designed to provide repeated systematic (by time of day) measurements of representative features at higher and lower latitudes. IceCube is designed to provide such systematic measurements. The mission also has the potential to lend insight into understanding the role of solar wind proton and micrometeorite bombardment in formation, trapping, releasing of water and exosphere formation. The 13 secondary payload CubeSats that will be included on EM-1, including Lunar IceCube, will usher in a new era of solar system exploration with CubeSats and other small satellite platforms.
- Publication:
-
42nd COSPAR Scientific Assembly
- Pub Date:
- July 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018cosp...42E2149M