ALISE mission profile.
The Clementine, Lunar Prospector, and SMART-1 missions to the Moon provided tantalizing data that indicated the possible presence of hydrogen volatiles within permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles. These missions also indicated that there may be areas of high elevation that have much shorter “night-time” durations than the typical 14-day lunar night. If the hydrogen volatiles exist as water ice, and if nearby areas with longer durations of solar illumination can be exploited for power generation, the combination could be a boon to future human lunar exploration.
A Lunar In Situ Explorer (ALISE) is a conceptual design developed at the NASA Glenn Research Center in fiscal year 2006 for a robotic lander that would characterize the lunar environment and determine the presence of water ice in a permanently shadowed area in a lunar polar region. ALISE would provide ground truth measurements and demonstrate technologies that support the design of future robotic and human lunar exploration elements in the Vision for Space Exploration. From lunar orbit, the ALISE lander would deploy penetrators that would descend to a permanently shadowed area to determine the presence of water ice in the regolith and the subsurface strata. The lander would remain in orbit during this mission phase to act as an Earth data relay for the penetrators. Once the penetrator mission was completed, the lander would descend to a polar region that exhibits shortened night-time durations to provide in situ measurements of the lunar environment for at least 1 year. The lander would demonstrate precision landing capability in targeting one of these areas.
ALISE would provide significant data on the lunar polar environment, including radiation levels, neutron albedo, electrical characteristics of the lunar surface during the lunar day and night, surface and subsurface temperature profiles during the lunar day and night, characterization of the regolith dust properties and behavior, and the variation of solar illumination at the landing site over the course of a full year. The penetrators and the lander would contain passive devices that would act as beacons, providing navigational reference points for future robotic and human missions. ALISE would demonstrate power, navigation, communication, and in situ regolith processing technologies to support future robotic and human missions to the lunar surface. ALISE also would provide a design for a common lander platform that could support future robotic lander missions to the Moon or other extraterrestrial bodies.
Woytach, Jeffrey M.; and Hojnicki, Jeffrey S.: A Lunar In-Situ Explorer (ALISE). AIAA-2006-7398, 2006.
Glenn contacts:
Jeffrey M. Woytach, 216-977-7075, Jeffrey.M.Woytach@nasa.gov
Jeffrey S. Hojnicki, 216-433-5393, Jeffrey.S.Hojnicki@nasa.gov
Authors:
Jeffrey M. Woytach and Jeffrey S. Hojnicki
Programs/projects:
Exploration, Lunar Precursor Robotics Program, Constellation
Last updated: December 14, 2007
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