Farside explorer: unique science from a mission to the farside of the moon

Abstract

Farside Explorer is a proposed Cosmic Vision medium-size mission to the farside of the Moon consisting of two landers and an instrumented relay satellite. The farside of the Moon is a unique scientific platform in that it is shielded from terrestrial radio-frequency interference, it recorded the primary differentiation and evolution of the Moon, it can be continuously monitored from the Earth-Moon L2 Lagrange point, and there is a complete lack of reflected solar illumination from the Earth. Farside Explorer will exploit these properties and make the first radio-astronomy measurements from the most radio-quiet region of near-Earth space, determine the internal structure and thermal evolution of the Moon, from crust to core, and quantify impact hazards in near-Earth space by the measurement of flashes generated by impact events. The Farside Explorer flight system includes two identical solarpowered landers and a science/telecommunications relay satellite to be placed in a halo orbit about the Earth-Moon L2 Lagrange point. One lander would explore the largest and oldest recognized impact basin in the Solar SystemExp Astron (2012) 33:529-585 531 the South Pole-Aitken basin-and the other would investigate the primordial highlands crust. Radio astronomy, geophysical, and geochemical instruments would be deployed on the surface, and the relay satellite would continuously monitor the surface for impact events.

Volcanism on farside of the Moon: New evidence from Antoniadi in South Pole Aitken basin

“…Antoniadi basin is one of the exciting future potential landing sites on the farside of the Moon, which has not yet been studied by any rovers or astronauts. The lunar highlands and the SPA basin include major attractions for landing sites (Mimoun et al, 2012;Flahaut et al, 2012), because both of them provide a complete spectrum of lunar crustal and possibly mantle rocks for direct analysis. Here, we suggest the mare region of Antoniadi as a possible landing site for studying the petrogenesis of the young mare basalts as one of its goals.…”

Planetary Seismology

“…In view of the combined effects of 3D structure and poor seismic sampling of the lunar interior due to the limited source-receiver geometries, new data provided by future networks with very-broad-band (VBB) seismometers are required. Therefore, several projects in Japan (e.g., SELENE2, Tanaka et al, 2013), the United States (e.g., Lunette, Neal et al, 2011), and Europe (e.g., FARSIDE, Mimoun et al, 2012) have been proposed for establishing a new seismic station(s) on the Moon.…”

“…This level of accuracy was achieved for most of the lunar impacts (with the exception of the SIV-B 16 impact, which suffered from a radio-tracking failure), and the precise locations of the artificial impacts have also been confirmed by LRO imaging (e.g., Wolf et al, 2012). As an alternative to artificial impacts, Lognonné et al (2009) and Yamada et al (2011) recently proposed monitoring the flashes generated by impacts (e.g., Bouley et al, 2012;Ortiz et al, 2006;Suggs et al, 2008) on the near side and even the far side of the Moon (Mimoun et al, 2012) in order to obtain impact data for future lunar seismic experiments.…”

“…Moreover, the thermal insulation of space-qualified seismometers can reach time constants larger than 2 h, and an additional wind/thermal shield can create additional attenuation. These two forms of protection reduce the temperature variations experienced by the sensor to < 10 under martian conditions (Mimoun et al, 2012;Robert et al, 2012), leading to temperature fluctuations of a few tens of milli-Kelvins in the seismic band. An installation with a noise level comparable to terrestrial low noise model (e.g., about 10 À9 m s À2 Hz À1/2 in the seismic bandwidth, see Pedersen (1993)) is therefore the realistic goal of InSight.…”

Book of Proceedings Tenth Workshop Primorsko, Bulgaria 2018

“…This feature is especially useful for studies of solar drift pairs [Stanislavsky et al, 2017a and2017b], which are known to be emitted at lower frequencies, and collect statistics of their appearance. Another advantage could be achieved by placing the radio telescope on the far side of the Moon, where manmade RFI are screened by the Moon itself [Mimoun et al, 2012].The calculated values of GURT active antenna sensitivity were marked on the plot showing the levels of cosmic radio sources flux densities as seen from the Moon and are presented in Fig. 4.…”