|
The Lunar Flashlight is a planned low-cost CubeSat lunar orbiter mission to explore, locate, and estimate size and composition of water ice deposits on the Moon for future exploitation by robots or humans. The spacecraft, of the 6U CubeSat format, was developed by a team from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, and will be propelled by a solar sail.〔 It was selected in early 2015 by NASA's Advanced Exploration Systems (AES) for a launch in 2018.〔〔 ==History== NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and India's Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiters and other missions,〔 discovered in 2009 both water (H2O) and hydroxyl (—OH-) deposits at high latitudes on the lunar surface, indicating the presence of trace amounts of adsorbed or bound water are present.〔 These missions suggest that there might be enough ice water at polar regions to be used by future landed missions,〔〔 but the distribution is difficult to reconcile with thermal maps.〔 Lunar prospecting missions are intended to pave the way toward incorporating use of space resources into mission architectures. NASA's planning for eventual human missions to Mars depends on tapping the local natural resources to make oxygen and propellant for launching the return ship back to Earth, and a lunar precursor mission is a convenient location to test such in situ resource utilization (ISRU) technology. The mission concept was developed by a team from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and proposed to NASA's FY2014 Advanced Exporation Systems (AES) call.〔〔 The mission was selected for funding in Early 2015.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Lunar Flashlight」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|