Mission to Characterize Volatiles in Old, Cold, Permanently Shadowed Regions on the Moon
Whitepaper #365 submitted to the Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey 2023-2032. Topics: habitability and water; Mercury and/or the Moon; other: mission concept
by Dana Hurley, David T. Blewett, Joshua Cahill, Nancy Chabot, Benjamin Greenhagen, Charles Hibbitts, Rachel Klima, David Lawrence, Kathleen Mandt, Jorge I. Nunez, Wes Patterson, Parvathy Prem, Angela Stickle, Ariel Deutsch, Mona Delitsky, Jessica Flahaut, George Sowers, Eliot Sefton-Nash, Julie Brisset, Kris Zacny, Shashwat Shukla, Jonathan Grandidier, Sona Hosseini, Yang Liu, Sriram Bhiravarasu, Julie Stopar, Donald Barker, Leslie Gertsch, Devanshu Jha, Anthony Colaprete, Richard Elphic, Maria Banks, Mehdi Benna, William Farrell, Prabal Saxena, O.J. Tucker, Julie Mitchell, Debra Needham, Jared Atkinson, Simeon Barber, Amanda Hendrix, Georgiana Kramer, Matthew Siegler, Cesare Grava, Michael Poston, Kurt Retherford, Nandita Kumari, Jessica Barnes, Paul Hayne, Shuai Li, Paul Lucey, and Timothy Livengood
Published onMar 18, 2021
Mission to Characterize Volatiles in Old, Cold, Permanently Shadowed Regions on the Moon
We describe a mission concept to sample volatile composition, abundance, physical form, and distribution in situ from an extremely old, cold lunar permanently shadowed regions (PSR) and the environmental context of those parameters. The mission baseline is a nuclear-powered rover that will assay the volatile contents deep within a lunar PSR.
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