Speaker
Description
In this contribution, the concept of a thermal simulation environment for moving objects on the lunar surface is presented. The goal of this thermal simulation environment is to enable the reliable calculation of the temperature behaviour of a given object on the lunar surface by providing the respective transient heat fluxes for a mission on a given travel path.
At first, the modelling concept for a part of the lunar surface is presented. The relevant lunar topography is imported with data from NASA’s SLDEM2015 model and further processed, in order to obtain a three-dimensional thermal model of the relevant surface cut-out according to the defined travel path. In subsurface direction, the model consists of multiple nodes within a lunar dust layer and a regolith layer to depict the thermal behaviour.
The geometry of the object to be analyzed is placed onto the lunar surface at the desired coordinates and oriented according to the topography. The object is moved across the lunar surface as defined, and its orientation is adapted for each new time step depending on the topography underneath.
Additional to the lunar surface model, the concept of how the radiative cases are set up, updated and evaluated is introduced.
In the end, a whole example simulation result shall be presented.
