LSSW: Defining a Coordinated Lunar Resource Evaluation Campaign - Virtual Session 17

Monday, June 27, 2022

https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lunarsurface2020/

Venue: Virtual

Topics:

Background and Motivation

Evaluating the potential of local resources, particularly ice deposits at the lunar poles, in sustaining human exploration of the Moon has important implications for science, exploration, and commerce. At this time, NASA is investing in technology to harvest and use such resources and in missions to identify such ice-rich deposits [SMD missions VIPER, TrailBlazer, LunaH Map, PROSPECT in partnership with ESA, and the ShadowCam instrument that will fly on KPLO; STMD missions Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) and Lunar Flashlight; HEOMD/ESDMD mission Lunar IceCube]. Besides the United States, other countries have also proposed lunar orbiter and surface missions to the lunar poles for similar reasons. However, while the data to be obtained from these missions are quite synergistic and represent a good start to evaluating such resources, they do not represent a coordinated effort to understand them. In order to understand if these lunar resources could be used to sustain humans on the surface of the Moon, much more diverse and detailed information regarding the locations, amounts, distributions (heterogeneity), composition, accessibility, extractability, etc., is needed. A coordinated lunar resource evaluation campaign could obtain the required data.

Focusing Questions

• What constitutes a coordinated lunar resource evaluation campaign?
• What information does a coordinated lunar resource evaluation campaign need to obtain?

Goals

• Identify the basic information needed to evaluate ice deposits at the lunar poles, including the constraints/ranges required (i.e., local form, distribution, depth, composition, minimum viable abundance, data fidelity, variability, accessibility, extractability), which would inform measurement methods.
• Identify the measurement types and characteristics (such as resolution, coverage, etc.) that can be obtained to provide this information and the types of missions that could supply these data, including the areas on the Moon to be evaluated
• Identify ways of consolidating and compiling the information into an accessible, usable form (e.g., geostatistical modeling leading to resource favorability maps).