PS6.2

The lunar south pole is of great interest for upcoming lunar exploration endeavors due to the detection of large reservoirs of water ice in the pole’s permanently shadowed regions [1], which could be utilized to reduce the costs of a sustained presence on the Moon [2]. A strong focus of future robotic exploration missions will therefore be on the detection of water and related volatiles. For this purpose, the project Lunar Volatiles Mobile Instrumentation – Extended (LUVMI-X) is developing an initial system design as well as payload and mobility breadboards for a small, lightweight rover [3]. One of the proposed payloads is the Volatiles Identification by Laser Analysis instrument (VOILA), which uses laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) to analyze the elemental composition of the lunar surface with an emphasis on the detection of hydrogen for the inference of the presence of water. VOILA is a joint project by OHB System AG, Laser Zentrum Hannover e.V., and the German Aerospace Center’s Institute of Optical Sensor Systems. It is designed to analyze targets on the lunar surface in front of the LUVMI-X rover at a variable focus between 300 mm to 500 mm, allowing for precise measurements under various measurement conditions. The spectrometer covers the wavelength range from 350 nm to 790 nm, which includes the hydrogen line at 656.3 nm as well as spectral lines of most major rock-forming elements. The breadboard laboratory setup for VOILA was recently completed and first measurements of Moon-relevant samples have been made. Here, we will show the results of these measurements and will discuss their meaning for the further improvement of the instrument design and for its potential use as a volatile-scouting instrument at the lunar south pole.

[1] Li S. et al. (2018) PNAS, 36, 8907–8912. [2] Anand M. et al. (2012) Planet. Space Sci., 74, 42–48. [3] Gancet J. et al. (2019) ASTRA 2019. [4] Knight A. K. et al. (2000) Appl. Spectrosc., 54, 331–340. [5] Maurice S. et al. (2012) Space Sci. Rev., 170, 95–166. [6] Wiens R. C. et al. (2012) Space Sci. Rev., 170, 167–227. [7] Wiens R. C. et al. (2017) Spectroscopy, 32. [8] Ren X. et al. (2018) EPSC 2018, Abstract EPSC2018-759. [9] Laxmiprasad A. S. et al. (2013) Adv. Space Res., 52, 332–341. [10] Lasue J. et al. (2012) J. Geophys. Res., 117, E1.

How to cite: Vogt, D., Schröder, S., Hübers, H.-W., Richter, L., Deiml, M., Wessels, P., and Neumann, J.: VOILA on LUVMI-X: A LIBS Instrument for the Detection of Volatiles at the Lunar South Pole, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-5906, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-5906, 2021.

The Emirates Lunar Mission is developing the small and light weight "Rashid" rover. The goals for this rover are to traverse several hundred meters on the lunar surface during the course of one lunar day. The Rashid rover's science objectives cover both fundamental science as well as engineering topics with the goal to enable future missions to the lunar surface, and other airless solar system bodies. Hence, Rashid will carry a suite of scientific instruments and an experiment, covering a wide range of the physical properties at the lunar surface. The focus of investigation for the microscopic imager (CAM-M) will be to measure the regolith particle size distribution, and the lunar surface structure at microscopic scales. The Langmuir probe system (LNG) will address  the  electron density profile of the sheath, its behavior over the course of the lunar day, and its dependence on topographic features.  A thermal imager (CAM-T) with low spatial resolution is also foreseen. Finally, the in-situ testing of the adhesive and abrasive properties of various materials to lunar regolith is planned to be conducted by the MAD experiment.  In this paper the science program and instrumentation of the Rashid mission will be outlined.

How to cite: Els, S., Almaeeini, S., and Almarzooqi, H.: The science system on-board the Emirates Lunar Mission's Rashid rover, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-12950, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-12950, 2021.

The United Arab Emirates has announced its first space mission to the moon by 2024. The Emirates Lunar Mission (ELM) consists of a micro rover, named Rashid, has a main objective of traversing the mid-latitude landing site and obtaining high resolution images of the lunar surface. Such an objective necessitates careful designs of the architecture and the different systems involved to ensure smooth integration and proper operation.

The rover weigh around 10Kg and has 4 wheels that are designed to climb slopes of 20 degrees and rocks of maximum height of 10cm. Also, it is equipped with 2 wide field cameras that will be used for navigation and to increase the environmental awareness while the operator drives the rover remotely. Moreover, the rover is powered by the solar panels which are mounted in a certain angle to maximize the collecting of the solar energy. After the collection and battery charging, various regulated voltages are distributed to all subsystems.  

The Rashid rover is designed with two communications channels. The primary communications channel is the main channel used during the mission and allows for high speed bandwidth and low power consumption (on the rover). The secondary communications channel uses more power and is slower, but is not dependent on the lander and is therefore used as a backup as well as the lunar night recovery phase.

Despite being a small rover and its prime goal being a technology demonstrator, Rashid’s scientific instrument suite is substantial. The science instruments will provide data of the lunar surface environment allowing to investigate a vast variety of topics like geology of the Moon, lunar surface alteration mechanisms, Interaction of the soil with the solar wind and material suitability for future lunar missions. In this paper, the ELM mission, the rover subsystems as well as the science instruments are described in details.

How to cite: Almaeeni, S., Els, S., and Almarzooqi, H.: The Rashid rover: to guide the way for the next generation lunar missions and solar system exploration, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-14732, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-14732, 2021.

With the Artemis mission set to launch in 2024, returning humans to the lunar surface for the first time in over half a century, it is imperative to ensure human health and safety on a variety of fronts. Lunar dust exposure is one of many areas of concern regarding astronaut health and safety. During the Apollo missions it was reported that lunar dust was a nuisance and induced allergic-like symptoms upon exposure. In addition, it was also reported that instruments became coated with dust that was difficult to remove, and that the dust adhered to everything and tore through space suit fabric. Numerous inhalation studies have determined that lunar dust is more toxic than analogous terrestrial materials but less so than silica dust. Apollo dust mitigation systems were successful on some missions but failed on others. As humans are to stay on the lunar surface for extended periods relative to the Apollo missions, it is vital to fabricate instruments that would address the lunar dust problem with greater reliability. There must be multiple steps to remove all lunar dust, including the ultra-fine <10 µm fraction which was the most difficult dust size to remove. There must be multiple steps regarding lunar dust removal including a chamber to remove dust and de-suit, and a vacuum with high level HEPA filtration to remove dust. The first chamber would be to filter out any dust that comes into the module from the outside. Once all the air is clear, then the next step would be to remove any remaining dust on the suits using a hand-held vacuum with a HEPA H14 filter which only allows up to a maximum 0.005% of particles 100 nm in size to pass through the filter. Then, it would be safe to de-suit. It would be wise to have a second chamber between the first chamber and the command center of the lunar module that would vacuum any remaining dust before opening to the main command chamber. Ultra-high quality HEPA filters of both the chamber and hand-held vacuum systems should be replaced frequently to maintain optimal dust mitigation. Investing time and resources into lunar dust mitigation should be a top priority for the upcoming Artemis mission to avoid the issues encountered on the Apollo missions.

How to cite: Hendrix, D.: The importance of lunar dust mitigation during future human led lunar missions, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-10478, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-10478, 2021.

MiniPINS (Miniature Planetary IN-situ Sensors) is an ESA study led by the Finnish Meteorological Institute to develop and prototype miniaturised surface sensor packages for Mars and the Moon. The study aims at miniaturising the scientific sensors and subsystems, as well as identifying and utilizing commonalities of the packages, allowing to optimise the design, cut costs and reduce the development time. This presentation includes the main results from Phase A study and Preliminary Requirements Review of MiniPINS.

Acknowledgements

The MiniPINS (Miniaturized Sensor Packages and Delivery Systems for In-situ Exploration) Contract is carried out and funded by the European Space Agency activity no. 1000025265 in the “ESA-Star” System. 

How to cite: Genzer, M., Hieta, M., Haukka, H., Kestilä, A., Arruego, I., Apéstigue, V., Martinez Oter, J., Gonzalo, A., Reina, M., Ortega, C., Camañes, C., Sard, I., Dominguez-Pumar, M., Rodriquez Manfredi, J. A., Espejo, S., Guerrero, H., and Talvioja, M.: MiniPINS - Miniature Planetary In-situ Sensors, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-11282, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-11282, 2021.

Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, is the place in the Solar System showing the most Earth-like landscapes. Titan’s dense atmosphere and cold temperatures enable a complex methane hydrological cycle that have shaped the surface, very similarly to the water cycle on Earth. Titan has another peculiar feature: a wealth of organic grains is created by photochemistry in its atmosphere and progressively deposited at its surface. Such atmospheric production of organics likely occurred on Earth before the apparition of life; that is the reason why a better understanding of the formation processes, chemical composition and physical properties of these grains is of great interest.

The Dragonfly mission has recently been selected by NASA to explore Titan’s surface with a rotorcraft circa 2035 (Lorenz et al., 2018). Dragonfly will explore a region of organic sand dunes with monthly flights of a few kilometres each aiming to an impact crater named Selk. In addition to chemical analyses, Dragonfly is equipped with several sensors intended to characterize its environment. Among them, as part of the Dragonfly Geophysical and Meteorological (DraGMet) package, the EFIELD instrument will record the AC electric field at low frequencies (~5-100 Hz).

EFIELD consists in two spherical electrodes accommodated at different locations on the rotorcraft. The main scientific objective of EFIELD is to measure Schumann Resonances on Titan. Such resonances may have been detected by the Huygens probe in 2005 (unless it was an artefact of probe motion; Lorenz and Le Gall, 2020) and would be an indication of the existence of an underground global salty ocean (Beghin et al., 2012). Another scientific objective of EFIELD is the detection and characterization of charged grains. This work is dedicated to this secondary objective.

The exploration area of Dragonfly is covered by sand grains, most likely organic in nature, maybe mixed with ice. Surface winds can sometimes put them in saltation or suspension. In the process, these organic grains are likely to get charged by friction (triboelectric effect; Méndez-Harper et al., 2017), and would then induce a perturbation on the electric field detectable by the EFIELD antennas. To estimate the significance of this perturbation and test the possibility to measure it, we have built a numerical model that simulates the trajectory of charged particles in the probe environment, subjected to turbulent wind flows, gravity and electrostatic forces. First results show that charged particles will induce a strong measurable signal on the EFIELD spectra. We are thus currently investigating how these spectra can be used to derive information on the grains (number, charge, size or density). On Titan, EFIELD will work in synergy with wind sensors and a microscopic imager that will observe grains deposited at the surface.

The next steps in our simulations will be to account for the perturbations induced by the nearby body of Dragonfly. In parallel, we are building a prototype antenna to test it and check the ability of our model to reproduce its measurements in the laboratory and in the frame of field campaigns.

How to cite: Chatain, A., Le Gall, A., Hamelin, M., Berthelier, J.-J., Lorenz, R. D., Hassen-Khodja, R., Lebreton, J.-P., and Déprez, G.: Detection of charged organic grains at the surface of Titan with the EFIELD/DraGMet sensor on board Dragonfly, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-12900, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-12900, 2021.

How to cite: Jones, G. H., Snodgrass, C., and Tubiana, C. and the The Comet Interceptor Team: The Comet Interceptor Mission, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-15188, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-15188, 2021.

The flyby of a dynamically new comet by ESA-F1 Comet Interceptor spacecraft offers unique multi-point opportunities for studying the comet's dusty and ionised cometary  environment in ways that were not possible with previous missions, including Rosetta. As Comet Interceptor is an F-class mission, the payload is limited in terms of mass, power, and heritage. Most in situ science sensors therefore have been tightly integrated into a single Dust-Field-Plasma (DFP) instrument on the main spacecraft A and on the ESA sub-spacecraft B2, while there is a Plasma Package suite on the JAXA second sub-spacecraft B1. The advantage of tight integration is an important reduction of mass, power, and especially complexity, by keeping the electrical and data interfaces of the sensors internal to the DFP instrument.

The full diagnostics located on the board of the 3 spacecrafts will allow  to modeling the comet environment and described the complex physical processes around the comet and on their surface including also the  description of wave particle  interaction in dusty cometary plasma. 

The full set of DFP instrument on  board the Comet Interceptor  spacecraft will allow to model  the comet plasma environment and its interaction with the solar wind. It will also allow to describe the complex physical processes taking place including wave particle  interaction in dusty cometary plasma . 

On spacecraft A, DFP consists of a magnetometer, a Langmuir and multi impedance probe/electric field instrument, an ion and an electron analyzer, a dust sensor, and a central data processing unit and electronics box. On spacecraft B2, the instrumentation is limited to a magnetometer and a dust sensor. The choice of sensors and their capabilities are such that it maximizes synergies and complementarities. 

To give one example: While the dust instrument aims at establishing the dust spectrum for millimeter to micrometer sized particles, the Langmuir probes aided by the data processing unit will analyze the signatures of micrometer to nanometer sized particles.

Moreover, unique multi-point measurements will be obtained from magnetometers on the three spacecraft, from dust sensors on A and B2, and from ion measurements on A and B1.

The tight integration of dust-field-plasma sensor hardware and science targets embodied by DFP promises an optimized science return for the available resources.

How to cite: Baran, J., Rothkaehl, H., Andre, N., Auster, U., Della Corte, V., Edberg, N., Galand, M., Henri, P., De Keyser, J., Kolmasova, I., Morawski, M., Nilsson, H., Prech, L., and Volwerk, M.: The challenges of  the Dust-Field-Plasma  (DFP) instrument onboard ESA  Comet Interceptor mission, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-14541, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-14541, 2021.

The auroral electrojet is traditionally measured remotely with magnetometers on ground or in low Earth orbit (LEO). The sparse spatial coverage of measurements, combined with a vertical distance (~100 km to ground and typically >300 km to LEO satellites) means that smaller scale sizes cannot be detected.  Because of this, our understanding of the spatiotemporal characteristics of the electrojet is incomplete. Recent advances in measurement technology allow us to overcome these limitations by multi-point remote detections of the magnetic field in the mesosphere, very close to the electrojet. We present a theoretical prediction of the magnitude of these disturbances, inferred from the spatiotemporal characteristics of magnetic field-aligned currents. We further discuss how the Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer (EZIE) satellites that will carry Zeeman magnetic field sensors will be used to essentially image the equivalent current at unprecedented spatial resolution.  The electrojet imaging is demonstrated by combining carefully simulated measurements with a spherical elementary current representation using a novel inversion scheme.  This new capability will allow us to finally resolve long-standing controversies such as – what is the substorm current wedge configuration?

How to cite: Laundal, K., Yee, J.-H., Gjerloev, J., Vanhamäki, H., Reistad, J., Madelaire, M., and Sorathia, K.: Electrojet estimates from mesospheric magnetic field measurements, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-9255, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-9255, 2021.

The Earth Albedo is one of the important parameters in the study of climate change. In this work, the scientific background and mission analysis of a space based earthshine-telescope to observe Earth Albedo using relative photometry on the Moon with an accuracy of 0.1% is presented. The earthshine, which is the sunlight reflected from Earth on the Moon, is proportional in intensity to the surface-averaged Earth Albedo. This gives an advantage over LEO observations of Earth’s surface in that a global average can only be constructed from such data by overcoming difficult and well-known issues in surface reflectance studies.  A measurement with ground-based telescopes is limited by atmospheric variability, even at the best high-altitude sites; thus, a spaceborne instrument is proposed, which provides an increase in scientific performance. ROMEO, a satellite for research in Low and Medium Earth Orbit developed by IRS, serves as a test platform for the JULIET instrument. The JULIET instrument is the first space-based earthshine-telescope, developed by the DTU. A preliminary analysis is done to verify the feasibility of carrying JULIET on ROMEO. The orbit simulation software ASTOS is used to gather realistic observability time of the moon in different orbits.  Furthermore, an optical analysis shows that the scientific performance of JULIET can exceed that of current ground-based Earth Albedo measurements. This mission is seen as the precursor of further decades-long observations of Earth Albedo using a space-based earthshine-telescope. The data will raise the accuracy of current Earth Albedo measurements by one order of magnitude and thus contribute towards increasing the overall accuracy of climate data.

How to cite: Löffler, T., Petri, J., Fléron, R., Thejll, P., and Klinkner, S.: Feasibility study of high precision measurement of Earth Albedo in space, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-5621, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-5621, 2021.

The LGR High Energy Particle Spectrometer HEPS for the ESA Lagrange mission belongs to the satellite in-situ instrument suite. The satellite will be placed at the Lagrange point L5 for space weather measurements and real-time observations and alerts. The HEPS instrument with its six detector subsystems will enable the detecting of electrons, protons, and heavy ions at high flux conditions during Solar Energetic Particle Events. The electron and proton detection systems rely on standard telescope techniques covering energy ranges from 100 keV to 15 MeV and 3 MeV to 1 GeV respectively. Two sets of telescopes will be installed facing opposite directions along the Parker spiral. Additional detector with a wide angular range will enable measurements of angular distributions of particles traveling towards the satellite from the Sun. The HEPS heavy-ion telescope HIT represents a new design utilizing a set of scintillators and SiPM light converters. HIT electronics is equipped with a dedicated radiation-tolerant ASIC optimized for low power use and fast signal detections. The first model of HIT was developed and verified for spectroscopic measurements and ion identification. We report on test measurements as well as Monte Carlo simulations of the whole instrument. Results will be discussed and implications on the final design of the instrument provided.

How to cite: Hajdas, W., Marcinkowski, R., Xiao, H., and Kramert, R.: High Energy Particle Spectrometer for ESA Lagrange mission, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-15975, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-15975, 2021.