Complete Lunar Exploration Coverage Analysis

• Main Authors: Charles H. Lee, Kar-ming Cheung
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2008
• Subjects: South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.541.5524; http://tmo.jpl.nasa.gov/progress_report/42-175/175F.pdf

sponsorship acknowledged. NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration is to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon beginning no later than 2020. It is essential to provide an architecture that is ex-pandable and evolvable to meet the current and future communication requirements for Constellation’s International Space Station missions and lunar missions. This architecture includes the existing NASA ground-based and Earth-orbiting networks, as well as a possible network of lunar relay satellites. A key metric for decisions in selecting or expanding the communication infrastructure is its coverage capability. This article provides detailed cover-age analysis for various phases of a lunar exploration mission, including the launches of the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) and the Lunar Surface Access Module/Earth Departure Stage (LSAM/EDS), their low-Earth-orbiting operations and docking; the trans-lunar inser-tion of the CEV/LSAM stack, its lunar orbiting insertion and low-lunar-orbiting operations; and the LSAM descent/ascent operations, as well as the Earth return phase. The human outpost of lunar exploration is assumed to be at the lunar south pole; the top 10 landing sites suggested by NASA’s Exploration Systems Architecture Study for lunar sortie missions are also considered. Surface-to-surface, Earth, and solar coverage at the lunar south pole using Goldstone Solar System Radar terrain data are also analyzed and discussed. I.