Assessing the Distribution of Water Ice and Other Volatiles at the Lunar South Pole with LUVMI-X: A Mission Concept

Abstract

The search for exploitable deposits of water and other volatiles at the Moon’s poles has intensified considerably in recent years, due to the renewed strong interest in lunar exploration. With the return of humans to the lunar surface on the horizon, the use of locally available resources to support long-term and sustainable exploration programs, encompassing both robotic and crewed elements, has moved into focus of public and private actors alike. Our current knowledge about the distribution and concentration of water and other volatiles in the lunar rocks and regolith is, however, too limited to assess the feasibility and economic viability of resource-extraction efforts. On a more fundamental level, we currently lack sufficiently detailed data to fully understand the origins of lunar water and its migration to the polar regions. In this paper, we present LUVMI-X, a mission concept intended to address the shortage of in situ data on volatiles on the Moon that results from a recently concluded design study. Its central element is a compact rover equipped with complementary instrumentation capable of investigating both the surface and shallow subsurface of illuminated and shadowed areas at the lunar south pole. We describe the rover and instrument design, the mission’s operational concept, and a preliminary landing-site analysis. We also discuss how LUVMI-X fits into the diverse landscape of lunar missions under development.

Recovery policies for safe exploration of lunar permanently shadowed regions by a solar-powered rover

“…Let x 0 be an initial rover state in the operational region O. The orange set w represents a region 5 of the state space where a waypoint action can be taken once and provide a reward to the rover. The green region S represents the safe set of states, where we want the traverse to terminate with a certain probability.…”

“…4 Here, execution risk is the probability of mission failure when following a policy tree from a given node. 5 This region represents states co-located at the grid cell of the corresponding waypoint, but with different time and energy values. As such, given an (ordered) list of n w waypoints to visit, n w search segments are created starting with the last one (due to the backward search methodology).…”

“…These observations have sparked international efforts towards devel-979-8-3503-0462-6/24/$31.00 ©2024 IEEE oping robotic missions to further characterize the distribution of these resources for scientific and human exploration purposes. Numerous recent concepts requiring long-range mobility have been formulated [3][4][5][6]. The solar-powered Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER), one of the first missions of this kind, is expected to explore lunar PSRs near Nobile Crater in late 2024 or early 2025 [7].…”

VOILA on the LUVMI-X Rover: Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy for the Detection of Volatiles at the Lunar South Pole

“…In the framework of the Lunar Volatiles Mobile Instrumentation—Extended (LUVMI-X) project, a mid-size, low mass rover with subsystems was developed, dedicated to scout and study volatiles in lunar polar regions [ 7 , 8 , 9 ]. An integrated ion trap mass spectrometer with a drill and a neutron spectrometer allow for the analysis of volatiles in the shallow subsurface and up to a meter in depth [ 10 ].…”