Many Places to Explore
Several destinations are in the running for the initial mission, launching as early as December 2013 or as late as July 2014 depending on customer demand:
– The Moon’s south pole, where the robot will prospect for frozen water, methane, ammonia and other volatiles. These treasures were missed when the Apollo expeditions and Soviet robots only explored sites near the equator. Follow-on missions will recover the ice and export it as rocket propellant.
– An Apollo site where NASA astronauts left humanity’s first boot prints on another world. Worldwide television and Web audiences numbering in the billions will discover what has happened to their tracks and their landers after four decades of micrometeorite bombardment and harsh radiation. The high-definition cameras on board the robot will enable viewers to see the Apollo landscape with the same clarity as the astronauts with the first 3D video from another world.
– A “skylight” leading down into a volcanic cave, where robots and human explorers can shelter from the Moon’s radiation, punishing heat and cold, and the rain of micrometeorites. Three of these unusual pits have been discovered so far.
– The Google Lunar X PRIZE is available for expeditions to any location on the Moon including the three above, all of which are on the near side of the Moon where communication to Earth is straight line-of-sight.
– The Moon’s far side is a more challenging target because it never faces Earth for line-of-sight radio communications. These trips likely will require an orbiting communications relay and substantial autonomy to handle robot control when the relay satellite is not in the sky.
Far side radio telescopes can listen to the universe without interference from Earth transmissions and detect frequencies that are blocked by the Earth’s atmosphere. Astrobotic rovers also will blaze “Magellan routes” that circumnavigate the Moon. Magellan routes enable robots to escape the terrible cold of lunar night by always rolling west fast enough to stay ahead of sundown.
