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FEASIBILITY STUDY FOR LUNAR RESOURCE TRANSPORT AND DELIVERY THROUGH A PATH CLEARANCE VEHICLE

Abstract:

This work investigates several mission scenarios concerning the transport of water in rough lunar terrain. The detection of water ice deposits inside Permanently Shadowed Regions (PSR) at the South Pole (SP) expedited projects which intend to utilise these valuable resources. As a potential outpost for space exploration, the Moon has not only become a priority for the US, China, Russia and Europe but also gained popularity in the private sector, which is encouraged to participate in Lunar Missions. These diverse political, economic and scientific impulses have a common objective: ensuring a permanent human presence by the mid-2030s and being as independent of Earth as possible. One region in particular - called Connecting Ridge - has been identified as ideal for this purpose. This study targets a 20 km circular zone of operations around it. Once extracted, water is not only used for life-support, but also as fuel for ascent or descent vehicles, when processed further to its derivatives - hydrogen & oxygen. The necessity to transport these commodities is therefore assumed in this paper. Due to the distance and roughness of the terrain between the Connecting Ridge and surrounding PSRs, reasonably fast transportation of these commodities becomes challenging. On Earth, such goods are mostly delivered through pipelines; however their deployment, maintenance and reliability are difficult to ensure on the Moon. A suitable solution considered in this paper is a cargo surface vehicle which allows more flexibility than pipelines in terms of targeting different locations. Roving vehicles have various benefits such as heritage technology and being verifiable on Earth but also have challenging power demands. Space Mining Technologies has therefore developed a solution which aims to clear paths between two different sites around Connecting Ridge, relaxing not only complex path optimization requirements but also increasing speed performance for rovers solely focusing on transportation. This paper focuses on a path clearance procedure and provides a feasibility analysis of such a mission, along with a preliminary design of the vehicle. Details on power, thermal, communication, Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC), On-Board Data Handling (OBDH) and locomotion subsystems are given with relevant margins and assuming development of infrastructures from identified stakeholders. Lastly, it provides a comprehensive review of the study and addresses future work to optimise the system further.