Ancarola, and 7 co-authors, reported in 2005?, that a novel ASI Lunar mission was proposed by a task force of Ph.D. students. After 14th January 2004 president G.W Bush’s speech, a new input to space human exploration has been given. The Moon, thanks to nearness to Earth, is identified as an important test bed for all future human missions. The task force LUME mission has been designed to fit with Italian technological capabilities leaving it open anyway for international cooperation.
Three main module are foreseen:
a) a lunar low altitude polar orbiter,
b) a lander near the “peak of the eternal light” and
c) a rover.
The polar orbiter is equipped with a complete suite of experiments for remote sensing observation (high resolution color camera, VIS-NIR imaging spectrometer, neutron and X spectrometers and SAR radar). This will provide a lunar surface map in high spatial resolution at different wavelengths: the orbiter payload will be used both to refine the selection of the landing site and to support the rover navigation. The lander will reach the region of “peak of the eternal light”, located in the South Pole–Aitken Basin. This landing site has been selected for two main reasons:
a) sun-light is always available to deliver the power useful to perform lander experiments, and
b) some easily reachable and interesting craters are close to this region.
The lander carried a sun-powered ISRU plant to demonstrate O2 extraction from lunar (ilmenite) soil and a robotic arm that can pick up lunar samples both from the soil and the rover. The nuclear powered rover is equipped with a drill system that, in the first phase of its mission, will deliver samples to be processed by the ISRU plant. In a second phase the rover will move to “de Gerlache” crater, identified as an attractive region to search for water ice. The rover drill includes an imaging VIS-NIR spectrometer dedicated to analyze the mineral composition and the water ice presence along the walls of the excavated hole. Both the orbiter and the lander will carry as payload two aquatic enclosed ecosystems (biospheres). These systems have been chosen as the best trade off between reduced requirements and easy data comprehension to evaluate space environment effects on life.
The authors concluded that a mission concept has been developed, that relates to the renewed spirit of exploration declared by NASA with its new Vision for Space Exploration. In this context, the Italian Space Agency has promoted a Task Force of young Researchers and Ph.D. students, in order to identify a possible mission scenario which can address the Italian participation in the human space exploration. Hence, main requirements that led to the proposed mission concept are a mission compatible with Italian Resources, but easily evolvable in an International framework with cooperation with other Space Agencies, high scientific value, especially focused on the needs of the future human colonization of Moon and Mars, and advanced technology demonstration, again focused on the technologies critical for human outpost establishment on Mars surface.
The resulting mission scenario foresees a robotic mission to the Moon, in which main scientific objectives are to enhance Moon surface and internal structure knowledge, especially of polar regions; the search for water-ice on the Moon, of which the human presence would greatly benefit; and evaluation of the effects of extended presence of life in an hostile environment.
The conceived spacecraft has a modular structure, composed by a Polar Orbiter, devoted to global lunar mapping and analysis, sealed Biospheres, that will provide a life-in-space test-bed, a Lander, targeted to the South Pole-Aitken Basin, equipped with an In-Situ-Resource Utilization demonstration experiment, aimed to oxygen production demonstration on Moon surface, and, finally, a Rover, designed to reach permanent shadowed zone and meant to identify water-ice.
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