Pirarucu: The Mars moon prospector

The design of the Pirarucu mission has been undertaken by a team of undergraduates students at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University for the NASA/NIA 2015 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts - Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) competition. The team has completed a design iteration up to the equivalent of a mission concept review (MCR). Pirarucu is a Discovery class mission for prospecting Martian moons Phobos and Deimos. The concept is centered on a LADEE-like mothership that carries a set of twelve 12U Cube-Sats. The mothership is equipped with a suite of instruments similar to those on the Curiosity and the 2020 Mars rover, and is capable of performing laser spectroscopy, geological mapping, and chemical analysis of regolith samples. The mothership also serves as a telecommunication hub with the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) and communicates directly with the CubeSats on a common data link (CDL) architecture implemented with L3 Communications Net-T technologies. The 12U CubeSats explore the surface of the moon and collect surface samples to be returned to the mothership for analysis. The CubeSats are split into two teams, one team can perform in-situ surface science and the other retrieves samples for analysis on the mothership. Both CubeSat teams can be refueled by the mothership and thus are able to perform multiple excursions to the moon for surface science and sample collection to ensure analysis of a variety of sites on the surfaces of the moons.