Citation
Abstract
NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration is to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon beginning no later than 2020. It is essential to provide an architecture that is expandable and evolvable to meet the current and future communication requirements for Constellation’s International Space Station missions and lunar missions. This architecture includes the existing NASA ground-based and Earth-orbiting networks, as well as a possible network of lunar relay satellites. A key metric for decisions in selecting or expanding the communication infrastructure is its coverage capability. This article provides detailed coverage analysis for various phases of a lunar exploration mission, including the launches of the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) and the Lunar Surface Access Module/Earth Departure Stage (LSAM/EDS), their low-Earth-orbiting operations and docking; the trans-lunar insertion of the CEV/LSAM stack, its lunar orbiting insertion and low-lunar-orbiting operations; and the LSAM descent/ascent operations, as well as the Earth return phase. The human outpost of lunar exploration is assumed to be at the lunar south pole; the top 10 landing sites suggested by NASA’s Exploration Systems Architecture Study for lunar sortie missions are also considered. Surface-to-surface, Earth, and solar coverage at the lunar south pole using Goldstone Solar System Radar terrain data are also analyzed and discussed.
Keywords
Details
- Volume
- 42-175
- Published
- November 15, 2008
- Pages
- 1–30
- File Size
- 8.6 MB