LOFAR on the Moon: Mission Configuration and Orbit Design

Unperturbed observation of deep space radio waves is impossible to achieve from Earth but could be managed if the instruments were positioned in a place shielded from Earth, such as the far side of the Moon or the Shackleton crater, situated at its South Pole. In order to keep the costs of such a mission as low as possible, the VEGA launcher needs to be used. This MSc Thesis studies the possible mission designs and trajectories to land a minimum of 150 kg of payload in such a place. For the eight mission scenarios considered, the spacecraft can either use a Chemical Propulsion System (CPS) or an Electric Propulsion System (EPS) for the transfer to Low Lunar Orbit (LLO), the spacecraft can either circularize around the Moon in a polar orbit or in an orbit situated in the lunar orbital plane, and the relay can either be sent to the Lagrangian point L2 or be landed on the Moon. After preselecting the four feasible mission scenarios, a Matlab program was coded to simulate the trajectories flown from Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to LLO using either a CPS or an EPS, the trajectory from LLO to L2 using a CPS which is applicable to certain mission scenarios only, and the trajectory for the descent and landing also using a CPS. The inclination of the lunar orbital plane with respect to the launching site varying during the year, it was chosen to take the worst-case scenario for this study. The subsystem masses were then assessed to determine the payload mass that can be placed on the Moon. It was found that with the most successful CPS mission 34 kg of payload could be placed on the rim of the Shackleton crater, while 107 kg could be placed at that same place when using an EPS. For both cases, no relay module was sent to L2 and the spacecraft circularized around the Moon in a polar orbit. Even though the payload mass does not meet the 150 kg requirement, it should not be forgotten that this study belongs to the preliminary design phase of the mission: looking into the recommendations for further work and altering several parameters could change the final outcome.Space ExplorationSpace FlightAerospace Engineerin