An overnight habitat for expanding lunar surface exploration

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThis paper presents the conceptual design and analysis of a system intended to increase the range, scientific capability, and safety of manned lunar surface exploration, requiring only a modest increase in capability over the Apollo mission designs. The system is intended to enable two astronauts, exploring with an unpressurized rover, to remove their space suits for an 8-h rest away from the lunar base and then conduct a second day of surface exploration before returning to base. This system is composed of an Environmental Control and Life Support System on the rover, an inflatable habitat, a solar shield and a solar power array. The proposed system doubles the distance reachable from the lunar base, thus increasing the area available for science and exploration by a factor of four. In addition to increasing mission capability, the proposed system also increases fault tolerance with an emergency inflatable structure and additional consumables to mitigate a wide range of suit or rover failures. The mass, volume, and power analyses of each subsystem are integrated to generate a total system mass of 124 kg and a volume of 594 L, both of which can be accommodated on the Apollo Lunar Roving Vehicle with minor improvements. & 2015 IAA. Published by Elsevier Ltd. on behalf of IAA. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-SA license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).

An Emergency Mitigation System for Safer Lunar Surface Exploration

“…Further research could focus on designing an inflatable structure that is thinner and has a lower packing factor, to reduce the volume occupied by the stowed inflatable system. Additionally, future designs should incorporate lunar dust mitigation techniques, such as using multiple bladder layers during entry [5].…”

“…The earliest future lunar missions are assumed to be comparable in capability and scope to the later Apollo missions, with modest advances. Rather than the large pressurized roving vehicles like SPRITE [3] and permanent base envisioned under the Constellation program [4], this paper assumes sortie missions with a modest increase in landing mass and surface duration compared to the Apollo missions with the use of inflatable structures [5]. One of the assumed capabilities of these missions is having two rovers on the lunar surface.…”

“…However, for this paper, we focused on EVA. (For ECLSS System requirements on longer, overnight missions, refer to [5]). Values for EVA (and other scenarios) have been published by NASA in its Advanced Life Support Baseline Values and Assumptions Document [9] and its Human Integration Design Handbook [10].…”