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NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Long Duration Medical System Foundation for Lunar Orbital and Lunar Surface Exploration Missions

For long-duration lunar orbital and lunar surface (LDLOS) exploration missions, the NASA Human Research Program (HRP) Exploration Medical Capability (ExMC) Element has developed a medical system foundation through which clinical considerations may be represented via a systems engineering-based model. Components of the Long Duration Medical System Foundation model include a concept of operations (ConOps), functional decomposition, medical conditions to be addressed, clinical capabilities and resources, technical requirements, and traces of requirements to NASA standards documents and parent-level (Program- and Vehicle habitat system-level) requirements. The Foundation model offers the means to present information in a readily accessible format that is understandable across all clinical, engineering, scientific, and managerial disciplines. Collectively, these components constitute a foundation that serves future programs with similar long duration mission profiles as a starting point for medical system design. The Foundation was developed by a multidisciplinary team of systems engineers, scientists, and clinicians across NASA. The process started with ConOps development, subsequently decomposed into the functionalities needed to diagnose, treat, and prevent medical conditions. The clinical team identified medical conditions most likely needed to be diagnosed and treated during a long-duration lunar exploration mission. Through these approaches, requirements were codified for the LDLOS medical system. These requirements were then traced to NASA standards, medical conditions, medical capabilities, and medical resources, facilitating stakeholders’ use of the Foundation model to analyze traces and to identify medical system interfaces with other vehicle systems or subsystems. In addition, the Foundation may be used as a basis for performing risk trades on medical system mass and volume allocation. This discussion will focus on the processes through which the LDLOS Medical System Foundation was developed, how the Foundation builds a bridge between the medical and engineering domains, and how these processes may be applied more broadly to a crew health and performance system and other system domains.

Jay Lemery↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

New Topographic Products for the Lunar South Pole from the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA)

Due to the Moon’s low obliquity and highly cratered topography, its polar environments host regions of extreme illumination conditions. Multiple lines of evidence indicate the presence of geologically stable ice and other volatiles on or below the surface within polar permanently shadowed regions (PSRs). These regions are valuable targets for science and exploration as they hold clues to the history of water in the inner solar system and may hold sufficient reserves for in-situ resource utilization. Standing high above the PSRs, peaks of long-duration sunlight are oases where landed assets can easily generate power and communicate. For these reasons, the lunar south pole is the target of many upcoming missions including NASA’s Artemis program. The Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) onboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) provides the global geodetic framework with which past, present, and future missions can accurately geolocate their data. Laser altimeters like LOLA are unaffected by shadows and, therefore, provide the most direct measurements of topography within PSRs. Here we present the latest work to improve LOLA’s polar topographic maps and resulting derived products, such as PSR maps, which are crucial tools for science and exploration of the polar regions

Michael K Barker↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Volatile Abundance of Paired Lunar Troctolites and the Early Lunar Crust

Nominally anhydrous minerals (NAMs) such as plagioclase, pyroxene, and olivine can contain small amounts of water and other volatile elements, typically within crystal lattice defects. Given the volumetric abundance of NAMs, these minerals can contain a significant volatile reservoir despite their low abundances. At least one NAM is present in nearly all lunar rocks, unlike the more commonly studied volatile-bearing mineral apatite, making NAM-based hygrometry more widely applicable. NAMs are also not subject to enrichment in H due to self-fractionation of F, as is the case for apatite. Recent developments in secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) techniques (e.g., the reduction of analytical background) have allowed the evaluation of volatiles in samples that were previously too low in abundance to measure. The ability to make volatile measurements in the sub-10 ppm range opens up a suite of samples where volatile-bearing phases, such as melt inclusions and apatite, are rare or entirely absent. In this study we measure the abundances of H, C, F, P, S, and Cl in plagioclase from two paired lunar troctolites to better understand the volatile inventory of the early lunar crust and its implications for the bulk Moon.

volatiles↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Application and Use of Lunar Node-Derived Beacons for Lunar Surface Navigation

To maximize the scientific return and safety of operations on the lunar surface, multiple civil organizations are investing in Position, Navigation, and Timing infrastructure. This approach mimics the deployment of Global Navigation Satellite Systems around the Earth and aims to enable a similar robust capability around the moon. With these satellites, it will be possible to maintain high- fidelity knowledge of positioning and timing both on the surface and in orbit. For initial deployments, this capability is focused on high need areas, such as the Lunar South Pole, the target of the currently in-planning Artemis surface missions to high accuracy. Similar to GNSS systems, this capability will be implemented over time to build up to a level of global access for real-time navigation. For early missions, this means a limited capability in terms of coverage. To provide increased performance, ground augmentation can be leveraged. This not only provides an additional reference signal but helps to supply timing to enable a high accuracy real-time position solutions. This paper discusses the path towards evolving the Lunar Node 1 platform to augment these early constellation deployments. Analysis of notional performance with and without surface aids is provided, as well as discussion and paths towards deployment and operation. Given the analysis results, the benefit of surface navigation aids to both provide additional surface-based signals to fill in coverage gaps helps to provide additional robustness and an early-on capability.

Evan J. Anzalone↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Future Lunar Missions: the Need for Future Science Observations at the Lunar Surface

In the next few years, several opportunities are underway to take new science observations of the Moon. NASA’s novel Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program seeks to acquire delivery services from 14 US companies. Nine funded task orders have been selected with payloads from multiple disciplines. Here we review the upcoming geophysical CLPS payloads and their measurement objectives then we provide a review of the Lunar Geophysical Network mission in development for a future opportunity to fly to the lunar surface.

Moons↗
NASA NTRS2023

A New View of the Lunar South Pole from the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA)

Upcoming missions to the lunar south pole require detailed maps over large areas to fully characterize landing sites locally and regionally and to place their data into proper geologic context. To that end, we enhanced the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) altimetry dataset for the south polar region, from which we produced new maps of topography, topographic roughness, and permanently shadowed regions (PSRs). The roughness maps reveal a diversity of terrains characterized by hectometer-scale roughness which is controlled in this region primarily by cratering and downslope mass transport. The south polar region is littered with linear roughness features of order ~1 – 10 km wide and ~10s – 100s of km long hypothesized to be secondary impacts within extended ejecta rays. Non uniformities in these features could reflect variations in secondary impactor properties and/or target terrain properties. Poleward of 80° S, the PSR cumulative size-frequency distribution (CSFD) shows an approximately power-law behavior whose exponent has a spatial variation of ~10%. PSRs with areas < 1 km2 contain 15 ± 5% of the total PSR area. Finally, we studied the effect of false positives and false negatives on the accuracy of the measured PSR cumulative size-frequency distribution (CSFD) and on the area for any individual PSR. The new maps presented here have many applications in the science and exploration of the lunar south polar region, such as geologic mapping and traverse planning.

Michael K. Barker↗
NASA NTRS2024

NASA’s Lunar Communications and Navigation Architecture: Human Lunar Return

NASA’s Artemis missions will return humanity to the Moon, establishing a long-term presence there and opening more of the lunar surface to exploration than ever before. This rapid growth of lunar activity requires robust and resilient communications, navigation, and networking capabilities for crew safety, command and control of spacecraft, return of science data, and precise maneuvering of assets in space and on the lunar surface.

Michael J Zemba↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Constraints on the Lunar Interior Through Comparison of Observed Apollo Seismic Travel Time With Simulated Lunar Interiors

Understanding the current state of the lunar interior is key to evaluating its formation history and evolution. The analyses of seismic waves recorded by 5 years of the Apollo passive seismic network, from 1972-1977, have provided some fundamental constraints on the lunar interior structure. Here, we show that comparisons between (a) calculated seismic velocities of simulated lunar interiors and (b) measured Apollo seismic velocities can resolve new solutions. Specifically, we show that comparison of seismic travel times can be used to constrain the lower bound of possible selenotherms.

Moon↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Secondary Volcanically-Induced Lunar Atmosphere and Lunar Volatiles: 3-D Modeling and Analysis

The fact that the Moon could have a transient secondary atmosphere due to volcanic outgassing has been known for some time, though typically such an atmosphere was believed to be extremely thin (~10-8 bar) [1]. But recent research by Needham and Kring (NK) [2] suggests that during the peak of volcanic activity ~3.5 Ga such a volcanically-outgassed atmosphere could reach ~10-2 bar of surface pressure. In similar research Wilson et al. [3] proposed a more conservative estimate, arguing that the thickness of such an atmosphere would depend on the intervals between major eruptions and may not exceed microbar densities. In either case a collisional atmosphere could be present, which would control transport of outgassed volatiles (such as H2O) and their deposition in polar regions, where they could be preserved until modern day frozen in permanently shadowed regions (PSR) or buried beneath the regolith. Here we study such a hypothetical atmosphere to investigate its stability, meteorological properties and the effect on transport of volatiles. We use the ROCKE-3D planetary 3-D General Circulation Model (GCM)[4]. The insolation and orbital parameters were set to conditions 3.5 Ga. The atmospheric composition, based on the list of outgassed species presented by NK in combination with our estimates for atmospheric escape, condensation and the results from our 1-D chemistry model, was chosen to be either CO-dominated or CO2-dominated (depending on atmospheric temperature). In this study we restricted ourselves to relatively "thick" lunar atmospheres of 1-10 mb, though we believe that our results will scale to thinner atmospheres as well. We present the results for ground and atmospheric temperature for modeled atmospheres over a wide parameter space. In particular we consider different atmospheric compositions (CO or CO2 dominated), a set of atmospheric pressures from 1 mb to 10 mb and a set of obliquities from 0o to 40o. We also present an experiment of a single major eruption [5] and show that in just 3 years ~80% of the outgassed water is deposited in polar regions. This demonstrates the efficiency of such an atmosphere in delivering volatiles. We argue that a secondary lunar atmosphere could play a significant role in forming volatile deposits currently observed in the polar regions of the Moon.

Lunar atmospheres↗