NASA’s focus of exploring the Moon’s south pole under the Artemis program has placed new emphasis on characterizing the quantity and distribution of water ice and other volatiles present within the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions (PSRs), first measured during the 2009 LCROSS mission. NASA’s VIPER rover is the first of a series of prospecting missions to characterize this water ice resource. NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) has developed the Light Water Analysis and Volatiles Extraction (Light WAVE) instrument shown in Figure 1 for a follow-on prospecting mission, designed to be a rover payload for water ice prospecting at various depths and locations within PSRs. A key source of error for lunar water prospecting instruments, including Light WAVE, is the loss of water in an icy regolith sample to the lunar vacuum via sublimation due to heating above its ice-stable temperature. This abstract and conference presentation discuss a sublimation model for Light WAVE’s sample crucible using COMSOL Multiphysics to assess the sublimation losses that would occur between sample collection from an external drill and sealing the sample within Light WAVE’s boiler.
Numerical Modelling of Sublimation Losses During Sample Handling Within the Light WAVE Lunar Water Prospecting Instrument
Lunar Polar Volatiles Conference ; 2022 ; Houston, TX, US
Aufsatz (Konferenz)
Keine Angabe
Englisch
Online Contents | 2003
|British Library Conference Proceedings | 2003
|Elsevier | 2003
|Prospecting Rovers for Lunar Exploration
NTRS | 2007
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