Exploring Extreme Lunar Environments through In-Flight Swarm Deployments

The presence of mineable water resources at the lunar south pole encourages the buildup of exploration activities ahead of robotic and crewed lander missions through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) and Human Landing System (HLS) programs. National U.S. policy calls for NASA, in partnership with commercial and international partners, to deliver the first woman and next man to the lunar south pole, a region critical to establishing a sustainable, permanent lunar presence. The identification and classification of lunar polar resources, especially water ice, is critical to the fulfilment of this directive and advances the human exploration of deep space. Previous sample return and in-situ analysis missions were limited to sites at the lunar equator low latitudes; alternatively, the most promising lunar polar prospecting data from the Clementine, Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), and Chandrayaan-1 satellites, which provide strong evidence for the existence of sizeable water ice deposits in permanently shadowed regions (PSRs), are remotely collected and do not offer the distributional and compositional information necessary to evaluate deposits of interest. The deployment and distribution of Deployed Untethered Swarm Trackers and Expendable Explorers (DUSTEE), launched from a CubeSat deployer affixable to a wide variety of exploration platforms, offers NASA and commercial partners a new method to access extreme lunar environments in search of water ice and other vital resources. Deployed across the surface, swarms of these low-mass payloads are designed to survive high impact forces from various altitudes during a spacecraft“s landing descent phase, allowing scientists to cover broader areas and achieve higher launch cadences at significantly lower costs per kilogram compared to past robotic missions. As a collaboration between Lockheed Martin and the Colorado School of Mines, this innovative and cooperative research effort connects industry and research universities for the purpose of accelerating human space exploration and advancing our understanding of our closest celestial neighbor.