GNC Challenges and Opportunities of CubeSat Science Missions Deployed from the Lunar Gateway

The Lunar Gateway is expected to be positioned on-orbit around the Moon or in a Halo orbit at the L2 Lagrange point. The proposed Lunar Gateway is a game-changer for enabling new, high-priority lunar science utilizing Cu-beSats and presents a refreshing new opportunity for utilization of these small spacecraft as explorers. In context, CubeSats are being stretched to their limits as interplanetary explorers. The main technological hurdles include high-bandwidth communications and reliable high delta-v propulsion. Advances in deep-space attitude determination and control has been made possible from the recent NASA JPL MarCO missions. Due to these limitations, CubeSats are primarily designed to be dropped-off from a larger mission. The limited mass and volume have required compromises of the onboard science instruments, longer wait times to send back science data to Earth, shorter mission durations or higher accepted risk. With the Lunar Gateway being planned to be closer to the Moon, it will provide significant savings for a propulsion system and provide a primary relay for communication apart from the DSN and enable tele-operated command/control. These three factors can simplify the mission enabling routine deployment of CubeSats into lunar orbit and enable surface missions. In this paper, we present preliminary designs of 2 CubeSat lunar landers that will explore the lunar pits, Mare Tranquilitatis and the remnant magnetic fields Reiner Gamma.

[1]  D. Blewett,et al.  Lunar swirls: Examining crustal magnetic anomalies and space weathering trends , 2011 .

[2]  L. Hood,et al.  The Moon: Sources of the Crustal Magnetic Anomalies , 1979, Science.

[3]  Dennis C. Reuter,et al.  Lunar Ice Cube Mission: Determining Lunar Water Dynamics with a First Generation Deep Space CubeSat , 2016 .

[4]  Thomas H. Zurbuchen,et al.  Achieving Science with CubeSats: Thinking Inside the Box , 2016 .

[5]  Joshua Schoolcraft,et al.  MarCO: Interplanetary Mission Development on a CubeSat Scale , 2016 .

[6]  Mark S. Robinson,et al.  Confirmation of sublunarean voids and thin layering in mare deposits , 2012 .

[7]  Jekanthan Thangavelautham,et al.  Flying, Hopping Pit-Bots for Cave and Lava Tube Exploration on the Moon and Mars , 2017, ArXiv.

[8]  Hamid Hemmati,et al.  Interplanetary CubeSats: Opening the Solar System to a Broad Community at Lower Cost , 2011 .

[9]  Jekan Thangavelautham,et al.  Photovoltaic electrolysis propulsion system for interplanetary CubeSats , 2016, 2016 IEEE Aerospace Conference.

[10]  Mark S. Robinson,et al.  Distribution, formation mechanisms, and significance of lunar pits , 2014 .

[11]  Jekan Thangavelautham,et al.  Arne - Exploring the Mare Tranquillitatis Pit , 2014 .

[12]  Jekanthan Thangavelautham,et al.  Tackling Learning Intractability Through Topological Organization and Regulation of Cortical Networks , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems.

[13]  Les Johnson,et al.  Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) Scout , 2014 .

[14]  Michael Tsay,et al.  The Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper (LunaH-Map) Mission , 2015 .

[15]  Jekan Thangavelautham,et al.  Inflatable antenna for cubesat: Extension of the previously developed s-band design to the X-band , 2015 .

[16]  A. Iwasaki,et al.  Possible lunar lava tube skylight observed by SELENE cameras , 2009 .

[17]  R. Anderson,et al.  Using electrical impedance spectroscopy to detect water in planetary regoliths. , 2008, Astrobiology.

[18]  Hutao Cui,et al.  A new approach based on crater detection and matching for visual navigation in planetary landing , 2014 .

[19]  Reiner Gamma albedo features reproduced by modeling solar wind standoff , 2018 .

[20]  Robert M. Zubrin.  Moon Direct: A Cost-Effective Plan to Enable Lunar Exploration and Development , 2019 .