ESA's Polar Lunar Lander project enters phase-B1

Link @ ESA: "Fly us to the Moon…south pole to be precise"

ESA Human Spaceflight and Exploration

ESA's Directorate of Human Spaceflight is inviting industrial, technology and scientific communities to provide inputs for experiments and payload elements for accommodation on its first lunar lander.

This Request for Information follows last year's ESA Council Meeting at Ministerial Level, where funding was approved for ESA to work towards launching a lunar lander in the 2017–20 timeframe within the European Transportation and Human Exploration Preparatory Activities programme and the Global Exploration Strategy (GES)...

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Data Release 1

http://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/missions/lro/default.htm

March 15, 2010. The first release of data from LRO is now online.

HISTORY OF THE LUNAR POLAR CRYOSPHERE

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2009/pdf/2259.pdf

M.A. Siegler¹, B.G. Bills² , D.A. Paige¹ ,

¹UCLA Earth and Space Sciences, Los Angeles, CA 90095 (siegler@ucla.edu)

² Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA 91109

[Excerpt]

Impact on the search for ice: Many mechanisms have been proposed for the delivery of ice to near polar craters from cometary materials to solar wind implantation. Ice sitting at the surface is relatively stable below 110K as sublimation rates fall below 10^-9 m/yr. However, ice will only be driven thermally downward if subsurface temperatures are colder than those at the surface. Thermal gradients create a saturation vapor pressure gradient which drives molecules to move. Molecules are more mobile at higher temperatures, so warm seasons will cause a net subsurface deposition of ice, while cold seasons will move ice upwards, but very slowly.

Our model hints that the current lunar cold traps, colder on the surface than the subsurface (due to geo-thermal heat), are especially poor retaining newly trapped surface ice. Water molecules reaching shadowed craters will likely remain at or very near the surface and be subject to micrometeorite gardening, sublimation and other possible mechanisms for removal. Assuming this is also the case for Mercury, it may be that near surface ice there is very ancient and originated from a larger subsurface reservoir.

Our modeled early lunar history, when large inclination variations drove higher amplitude precessional period waves, would have been a comparably ideal time for capturing and burying volatiles. Shadowed seasons might capture abundant ice delivered to the surface by heavy bombardment era comets or lunar volcanism, while illuminated seasons drove it downward.

The question then is how deep might early ice driven and did temperatures in the subsurface get warm enough during the Cassini transition to desiccate the Moon to depth? Early calculations show maximum temperatures during the transition may be low enough, but commentary on the survival of ice requires a more detailed diffusion modeling of ice loss rates. As of now, it seems a reasonable claim that early cold trap ice could have been driven to depths on the order of 10m, survived the Cassini state transition, and is presently migrating very slowly towards the surface. The lunar cold traps may be filling with ice, but more likely from below, rather than from above.

Here is an oblique image of Cabeus oriented to approximately match the topographic map below. The LCROSS impact location is marked by a gnomon. About half the crater is illuminated. Detailed knowledge of solar insolation and Earth visibility as a function of time for polar latitude lunar sites will be important for planning, operations and scientific analysis of in-situ measurements.

Here is a topographic map of the Cabeus region generated by the LOLA team. Data from LOLA will be used to generate maps of solar insolation and Earth visibility as a function of time for this area.

Cabeus Location Chart

Locator chart for Cabeus crater, 84.9 S, 35.5 W.

Niccolo Cabeo was an Italian astronomer (1586-1650).

Above chart based on U.S. Air Force Lunar Polar Chart LMP-3:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatalog/LMP/lmp3

NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper, an instrument on the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 mission, took this image of Earth's moon. It is a three-colour composite of reflected near-infra-red radiation from the sun, and illustrates the extent to which different materials are mapped across the side of the moon that faces Earth. Small amounts of water were detected on the surface of the moon at various locations. This image illustrates their distribution at high latitudes toward the poles. Blue shows the signature of water, green shows the brightness of the surface as measured by reflected infra-red radiation from the sun and red shows an iron-bearing mineral called pyroxene.