Legacies and Lessons: Learning from Apollo 16 and 17 sampling for future autonomous planetary exploration

In planetary exploration, once a landing site has been selected and a mission has successfully landed, one of the next decisions will be sampling location. Stationary missions that do not have the benefit of mobility, such as pathfinding landers to ocean worlds like Europa, and those limited by surface lifetime, will require some degree of autonomy in the selection of sampling locations within a reachable workspace (Hand et al., 2022). Therefore, the process of sample location selection is worth constraining.

In this work, we investigate Apollo 16 and 17 sampling sites, treating the Moon as our best Europa analogue. We use archival reports, imagery, and other data of four Apollo 16 and three Apollo 17 sites and their corresponding drive tube core samples to constrain how the surface appearance of sampling sites couples with subsurface geology. The surface and subsurface geology are summarized using bin classifications for grain size and shape as first-order representations of regolith formation processes, and then compared with each other and contextualized by descriptions of the astronauts’ sampling decision-making to understand the impact factors in sampling the surfaces of worlds like the Moon. The work is relevant to other data-constrained, short-lived surface sampling missions that will rely on autonomy, as well as future human sampling activities during crewed exploration (e.g., the Artemis program).

References

Hand, K. P., C. B. Phillips, A. Murray, J. B. Garvin, E. H. Maize, R. G. Gibbs, G. Reeves, et al. 2022. “Science Goals and Mission Architecture of the Europa Lander Mission Concept.” The Planetary Science Journal 3 (1): 22. https://doi.org/10.3847/psj/ac4493.