Speaker
Description
This is a follow up to the presentation given at the ESTEW 2021, “Modelling of a polar lunar landing site ESATAN-TMS”. The focus of the presentation is on the thermal modelling of lunar South pole landing sites, with intermittent illumination conditions, applicable to upcoming ESA missions PROSPECT and Argonaut. For these, there is an interest to have a practical modelling of the lunar surface temperature, whilst maintaining a reasonable model size and computational time. Three lunar regolith thermal models with increasing complexity are evaluated with examples shown in ESATAN-TMS.
As a secondary topic, the presentation showcases three novel uses of the new ESATAN-TMS 2023 Python API. The API permits interaction with the model tree and access/modification of primitive attributes. The first example concerns meshing of the lunar surface, using Lunar Digital Elevation Model data and third party tool MeshLab for a given landing site. The second example demonstrates a connection between ESA SPICE service WebGeocalc to get vectors of azimuth and elevation of solar illumination of the lunar surface given and landing site location and epoch. Finally, the last example concerns the thermal model, and shows how a sub-surface regolith model can be applied onto a surface mesh via generation of properties, non-geometric nodes and conductors.
Finally, comparisons of modelling techniques will be drawn comparing terrain to the disk modelling. In addition, some conclusions about the ESATAN-TMS Python API are made, with some suggestions for the future improvements.
