Lunar Ice Cube

Description

Lunar Ice Cube is a CubeSat mission to study the distribution of water and organic volatiles on the Moon from lunar orbit. The spacecraft is scheduled to be a ride-on mission on the Artemis 1 launch, currently planned for 2022. The primary scientific objectives of the mission are to: enable broadband spectral determination of composition and distribution of volatiles in regolith on the Moon and analogous bodies as a function of time of day, latitude, regolith age, and composition; provide geological context by way of spectral determination of major minerals; and enable understanding of current dynamics of volatile sources, sinks, and processes, with implications for evolutionary origin of volatiles.

Lunar Ice Cube is a 6U CubeSat, approximately 10 x 20 x 30 cm in size, with two deployable solar panel wings. It has a mass of approximately 14 kg. Propulsion of 1.24 mN is provided by a BIT-3 RF electric ion propulsion system using 3 kg of wet iodine propellant. Solar cells and rechargeable batteries provide 120 W of continuous power. Communications are via the Iris X-band radio system and dual patch antennas and a UHF beacon. The spacecraft will carry one instrument, the Broadband InfraRed Compact High-resolution Explorer Spectrometer (BIRCHES).

After launch on 16 November 2022 as a ride-share on Artemis 1 on the SLS Block 1 booster and deployment, Lunar Ice Cube used a low thrust transfer trajectory to head to the Moon and will go into a high-inclination elliptical orbit with a perilune of 100 km, from which the BIRCHES instrument will collect data on any water on the surface in gaseous, liquid, and solid form. The mission is scheduled to last for 6 months.

Image credit: Morehead State University