Speakers
Description
The ongoing project PROSPECT is aiming to land a drill (ProSEED) and a lab (ProSPA) on the surface of the Moon with the Russian Luna-27 mission planned for 2024/2025. The objective is to detect and quantify the presence of sub-surface ice in South Polar regions of the Moon. The environment is thermally challenging given the wide range of lunar surface temperatures and the varying lighting conditions. Furthermore, only a few details of the Russian lander are available. In addition the landing site and local illumination conditions are not fully defined.
The instrument requires the samples to stay below 150 K between sample acquisition until they are sealed in an oven. The drill which takes the samples is connected to the lander interface. Its temperatures are driven by the lander interface plate temperature and the radiative environmental conditions, i.e. direct solar illumination, IR heat flux from the lunar surface as well as radiative exchange with the lander.
In this study, we focused on the use of ESATAN-TMS to model the orientation of a lander on the surface of the Moon accurately. We identify several ways of accommodating the movement of the Sun over the horizon over the course of a lunar day and performed a set of sensitivity analyses to define the operational window of the drill.
