MARAUDERS: A small spacecraft mission to probe the lunar polar volatiles in situ
Abstract
Large permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) in the Moon's poles are cold enough to accommodate scientifically and economically valuable volatiles such as water-ice for geologically long timescales. Nevertheless, low-resolution remote sensing observations from lunar orbiters and laboratory studies show controversy on the nature, abundance, distribution, and presence of these volatiles. Resolving these uncertainties by in-situ measurements would be invaluable for future manned/unmanned lunar exploration missions, as reported by the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group through the Strategic Knowledge Gaps. To address this need, we propose a low-cost, high-risk/high-gain mission concept, which consists of a small spacecraft equipped with a number of small, short-lived and inexpensive instrumented nano-impactors, collectively named as MARAUDERS. According to the proposed architecture, a carrier spacecraft will be inserted on a collision course with the Moon within a piggy-back translunar launch opportunity. It will then perform a large deceleration maneuver down to a few km altitude while spinning to maintain a fixed attitude before collision. After burnout, the spinning carrier will deploy multiple impactors into a targeted PSR to cover multiple length scales. Upon impact, the impactors will measure the deceleration profile via inertial measurement units and relay this information back to Earth. The relayed data would be then utilized to characterize the regolith structure at different length scales. The potential PSR targets for this mission were selected based on the PSR elevation, probability of water-ice presence and visibility from Earth for communication. Impact patterns on the surface were computed for different burn-out altitudes, spin rates and time delays between deployments. A randomized impact analysis was performed in procedurally generated high- and low-variation terrains with different areal water-ice coverage. It was found that for a 0.25 km2 terrain, 12 impactors would be sufficient to achieve about tens of meters resolution, i.e. better than current remote sensing datasets (>200 m). The proposed concept can thus provide a first order understanding of the top-surface structure and the information on the distribution of volatiles in higher resolution.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.P33D..04C
- Keywords:
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- 6094 Instruments and techniques;
- PLANETARY SCIENCES: COMETS AND SMALL BODIES;
- 5794 Instruments and techniques;
- PLANETARY SCIENCES: FLUID PLANETS;
- 6297 Instruments and techniques;
- PLANETARY SCIENCES: SOLAR SYSTEM OBJECTS;
- 5494 Instruments and techniques;
- PLANETARY SCIENCES: SOLID SURFACE PLANETS