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10kBq Jaro


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Marshall hopes lunar lander makes return trips
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How about just building an extra copy of the MSL nuke rover ? ....it could easily operate in the permanently shadowed lunar polar craters.

http://www.al.com/news/huntsvilletimes/index.ssf?/base/news/1136196918128980.xml&coll=1


Marshall hopes lunar lander makes return trips


Scientist says probe isn't seen as 'one-shot effort'


The Huntsville Times, Monday, January 02, 2006


By SHELBY G. SPIRES, Times Aerospace Writer, shelbys@htimes.com


Before America sends astronauts back to the moon, NASA scientists want to find minerals and water that could help sustain life on the lunar surface.


About 10 people at Marshall Space Flight Center and another 40 at NASA sites around the country are developing what NASA engineers believe will be a complex, unmanned lunar lander that will serve as a test run for a manned lunar lander.


The probe isn't considered a "one-shot effort like the unmanned lunar efforts in the past," said John Horack, the program manager.


When Apollo astronauts were headed to the moon in the 1960s, NASA launched several probes to orbit and land on the moon. This time, NASA wants to put as much as possible into basically two probes: the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Marshall's lunar lander.


The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is slated to orbit the moon, possibly by 2008, and take detailed photographs of proposed landing sites.


Horack said NASA engineers at Marshall and Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington, D.C., are completing studies that will serve as blueprints for the lunar lander probe and its mission.


"One of the interesting concepts we have been considering is whether this should be a smaller version of the proposed lunar lander that will put humans on the moon," he said. "Consideration has to be given that we are taking up resources to place this on the moon, and it's not just one shot. A crew could use it at some later date."


Horack said the lander would set down on the moon's south pole near a crater where scientists believe ice may be.


"Obviously, water is important for human survival," Horack said. "But we are looking for different types of lunar material and mineral also."


NASA planners hope the right combination of moon rocks can be used to produce rocket fuel to help reduce the weight and cost of lunar missions.


Marshall was awarded management of the program in September. It is slated to cost between $450 million and $750 million.


"It's still early in the program, and that's the reason for the price range," Horack said. "That number will become definite later."


Horack said mission planners are grappling with what the lander will accomplish and which tools will be used once it sets down on the moon.


One approach under consideration would be to use an instrument mounted on "something like a jet pack," Horack said. "It ... would hop across the moon's surface and take samples and measurements," but the jet-pack-propelled instrument would be limited to about "12 hops and a couple of hours of operation."


Also being considered is a rover similar to one NASA sent to Mars. The rover has its own drawbacks because of power limitations and, Horack asked, "if it gets down in a crater, will it be able to get back out again? The hopper could possibly come back."


The mission studies should be completed next month, Horack said, and a working probe configuration should be ready for review by summer.


"At first glance, the rover looks like a well-proven technology, but is it?" Horack said. "Will it be useful for this application? Those are the type of questions we have to answer throughout this program."



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GoogleNaut


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Good idea...lunar gravity is so low that a six wheeled drive unit should be able to crawl out of craters. If not, then a spring loaded grapnel launcher with a winch ought to work pretty well too. Such a system ought to allow a rover to safely repel down even very steep inclines.

A Lunar Version of a MSL makes sense--I can't think that there would be really too many differences. And the amount of science return could be well worth the mission price. Almost real time control and high-bandwidth communication should allow the return of hundreds of thousands of high resolution images.

A lunar jet-pack? While this idea seems really sexxy, I'd have to say that from an engineering point of view I see a lot of problems. No one except the original Apollo astronauts have ever flown anything on the moon. There are serious issues with lunar dust--jet packs will briefly kick up horrendous amounts of dust.

Also, flying a jet pack is just asking for trouble. Cracked faceplatets, broken bones, and the occasional splattering in the bottom of a deep chasm come to mind. I think there must be a better way of getting around...
Seems to me we should go with what we know. The original lunar rover design was pretty good--it had its limitations but it was the first ever lunar "Jeep." And it was four-wheel-drive...


-- Edited by GoogleNaut at 05:45, 2006-01-03

-- Edited by GoogleNaut at 05:47, 2006-01-03

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