Plasma Sensor for Detecting Meteoroid Impacts on the Moon

Meteoroids that impact onto spacecraft can not only cause structural damage, but also generate a dense, rapidly expanding plasma that can electrically damage the spacecraft. It has been shown, in both simulation and ground-based hypervelocity impact (HVI) experiments, that HVI induced plasma can produce radio frequency (RF) emission during its expansion. The RF emission can interfere with the spacecraft's internal electronics, and is suspected to be the cause of many recorded anomalous spacecraft failures. Therefore, understanding HVI plasma is crucial to making accurate risk assessments for missions that are susceptible to meteoroids impact. This work focuses on a new transient plasma analyzer (TPA) that can be deployed on the lunar surface to detect meteoroid impact in its vicinity. Model tells us that the lunar surface will have a meteoroid surface flux of 2800 kg/day [1]. Of those, we expect to see micrometeoroid impacts at a highly frequent rate, which will be the main target of the proposed sensor. The high collision rate will allow us to get detections within a single lunar day, amounting to significant amount of data over the course of a mission. Larger meteoroids, on the centimeter to meter scale, will impact much less frequently but be much more damaging if they land on any ground equipment.