Mission operations design for lunar sample return as field-tested in an analogue deployment to the Sudbury impact structure

A Mission Operations Design will be described for an analogue robotic sample return mission on the far side of the Moon in the South Pole-Aitken Basin. The analogous site will be within the Sudbury Impact Structure. This scenario will use a rover acting alone supported by a single relay spacecraft. The structure established and tested will offer lessons for improving decision making and reducing training time across all similar planetary space missions, including private lunar missions. Differences between our process and the processes used by other recent science-driven Analogue Mission activities [4,6,7] will be discussed.