Session
Technical Session V: Forecast for the Future
Abstract
One significant item of unfinished business in lunar exploration is the mapping of the Moon’s notoriously-irregular gravitational field. This is of interest to science because it sheds light on the lunar interior, to exploration because it may help find useful resources, and to engineers because it is important for planning and operating missions in lunar orbit. Past mapping efforts have been severely hampered by the impossibility of Earthbased tracking of spacecraft over the lunar farside; the farside parts of the resulting maps are of questionable reliability. Many lunar-orbiter proposals have envisioned solving this with subsatellites, but none has yet flown. Lunette is a 5-kilogram payload, designed to fly on one of the next generation of low-altitude lunar-polar-orbiter missions, such as ISRO's Chandrayaan-1 and NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, for lunar gravity mapping. It includes a 3.5-kg subsatellite derived from the current CanX series of nanosatellites. It will provide a trustworthy full-globe gravity map with resolution equaling that of current nearside maps, plus higher-resolution maps of selected areas. A follow-on microsatellite mission offers hope of global maps with resolution improved by a factor of ten or more, at costs that are still trivial by planetary-exploration standards.
Presentation Slides
Lunette: Lunar Farside Gravity Mapping by Nanosat
One significant item of unfinished business in lunar exploration is the mapping of the Moon’s notoriously-irregular gravitational field. This is of interest to science because it sheds light on the lunar interior, to exploration because it may help find useful resources, and to engineers because it is important for planning and operating missions in lunar orbit. Past mapping efforts have been severely hampered by the impossibility of Earthbased tracking of spacecraft over the lunar farside; the farside parts of the resulting maps are of questionable reliability. Many lunar-orbiter proposals have envisioned solving this with subsatellites, but none has yet flown. Lunette is a 5-kilogram payload, designed to fly on one of the next generation of low-altitude lunar-polar-orbiter missions, such as ISRO's Chandrayaan-1 and NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, for lunar gravity mapping. It includes a 3.5-kg subsatellite derived from the current CanX series of nanosatellites. It will provide a trustworthy full-globe gravity map with resolution equaling that of current nearside maps, plus higher-resolution maps of selected areas. A follow-on microsatellite mission offers hope of global maps with resolution improved by a factor of ten or more, at costs that are still trivial by planetary-exploration standards.
