Figure 1. The entire Lunar Sample Return mission trajectory is shown in the Earth-Moon rotating frame. The

• Main Authors: Martin W. Lo, Min-kun J. Chung
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aitken; Landing The; South Pole; The Landing; South pole
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.163.9609; http://www.gg.caltech.edu/~mwl/publications/papers/LSRviaIPS.pdf

Earth launch is in brown, the insertion into LL2 is in blue, the lander orbit to the Moon in red, and the lander return orbit is purple. The expanded detailed plot on the right shows the halo orbit about LL2 and the landing. The dynamics of the lander return trajectory (purple) is not apparent in this figure, but is revealed in Figure 6 under the Sun-Earth rotating frame. The Aitken Basin at the lunar south pole is the largest impact crater known in the Solar System, piercing the Moon’s mantle. A National Research Council panel recently recommended that NASA consider a robotic Lunar Sample Return mission to collect samples from the Aitken Basin and return them to Earth for study [1]. This paper describes several approaches to a Lunar Sample Return mission. The Lunar Sample mission consists of two spacecraft: a communications orbiter module and a lander/sample return module; the combined flight system is carried to the Moon. The desired landing site in this case is on the backside of Moon which cannot be seen from Earth; this is why a communications orbiter module is needed. Knowledge of the Interplanetary Superhighway tunnels and their dynamics provided good initial guess solutions for the final integrated solutions (see Figure 1). The exploration of the design trade space was facilitated by JPL’s LTool2001 mission design tool. 1.