Abstract
The Lunar Meteoroid Impact Observer (LUMIO) is one of the four projects selected within ESA’s SysNova competition to develop a small satellite for scientific and technology demonstration purposes to be deployed by a mothership around the Moon. The mission utilizes a 12U form-factor CubeSat which carries the LUMIO-Cam, an optical instrument capable of detecting light flashes in the visible spectrum to continuously monitor and process the meteoroids impacts. In this chapter, we will describe the mission concept and focus on the performance of a novel navigation concept using Moon images taken as byproduct of the LUMIO-Cam operations. This new approach will considerably limit the operations burden on ground, aiming at autonomous orbit-attitude navigation and control. Furthermore, an efficient and autonomous strategy for collection, processing, categorization, and storage of payload data is also described to cope with the limited contact time and downlink bandwidth. Since all communications have to go via a lunar orbiter, all commands and telemetry/data will have to be forwarded to/from the mothership. This will prevent quasi-real-time operations and will be the first time for CubeSats as they have never flown without a direct link to Earth. This chapter was derived from a paper the authors delivered at the SpaceOps 2018 conference [1].
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Abbreviations
- ADCS:
-
Attitude determination and control system
- CCD:
-
Charge-coupled device
- CCSDS:
-
Consultative committee for space data systems
- CDF:
-
Concurrent Design Facility
- CONOPS:
-
Concept of operations
- COTS:
-
Commercial off the shelf
- CRTBP:
-
Circular restricted three-body problem
- EOL:
-
End of life
- ESA:
-
European Space Agency
- FOV:
-
Field of view
- HIM:
-
Halo injection maneuver
- IMU:
-
Inertial measurement unit
- LUCE:
-
Lunar CubeSat for exploration
- LUMIO:
-
Lunar Meteoroid Impact Observer
- NIR:
-
Near infrared
- OBPDP:
-
Onboard payload data processor
- PCM:
-
Plane change maneuver
- RF:
-
Radio frequency
- ROM:
-
Rough order of magnitude
- SADA:
-
Solar array drive assembly
- SK:
-
Station keeping
- SMIM:
-
Stable manifold injection maneuver
- SNR:
-
Signal-to-noise ratio
- TCM:
-
Trajectory correction maneuver
- TRL:
-
Technology readiness level
- UHF:
-
Ultra-high frequency
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Acknowledgements
This work has been funded through the ESA GSP program, Contract No. 4000120225/17/NL/GLC/as, as part of the SysNova LUCE challenge. LUMIO won ex aequo the challenge and was awarded a session in the ESA CDF to verify and refine the mission concept. We are thankful to ESA for the support received and in particular to its CDF team for the delta design conducted.
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Speretta, S. et al. (2019). LUMIO: An Autonomous CubeSat for Lunar Exploration. In: Pasquier, H., Cruzen, C., Schmidhuber, M., Lee, Y. (eds) Space Operations: Inspiring Humankind's Future. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11536-4_6
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