Preliminary assessment of a Ceres Polar Lander mission

Details Preliminary assessment of a Ceres Polar Lander mission Preliminary assessment of a Ceres Polar Lander mission

Sep 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008epsc.conf..403p&link_type=abstract

European Planetary Science Congress 2008, Proceedings of the conference held 21-25 September, 2008 in Münster, Germany. Online a

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Scientific paper

The quest for water in all forms is a major challenge of planetary exploration. In the Inner System, beneath the Frost Line, H2O is relatively scarce: for it to survive in its solid form outside Earth's and Mars' atmospheres, H2O has to lie in areas exposed to little or no Sun. Three planetary bodies in the Inner System have a spin axis almost perpendicular to their orbital plane allowing temperatures below the sublimation limit in their polar areas: Mercury, our Moon and dwarf planet Ceres (fig. 1). Apart from the Moon's poles where the presence of water ice is not evidenced yet, the poles of Ceres are attractive and relatively easy targets for an in-situ mission. They will have been mapped by NASA's Dawn Orbiter by 2015. The successful landing of NASA's Phoenix on Mars has brought another evidence of the interest of modern precision landing techniques for planetary exploration. NASA's MSL and ESA's Moon-NEXT Lunar Lander missions will bring other examples of the relevance of such designs in the years to come. Thales Alenia Space and the "Laboratoire de Planétologie et Géodynamique" of the University of Nantes have carried out a preliminary evaluation of a Ceres Polar Lander mission, so as to explore the possibilities offered by soft landing techniques on such a valuable and affordable scientific target. This poster presents this assessment. It illustrates the scientific interest of Ceres' poles and the challenges of this environment for a potential lander. It assesses the feasibility of the mission in a preliminary way, as well as the ability to benefit from previous lander designs.

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