Lunar Discovery Proposals, Proposed missions to the Moon Options

[Phil Stooke]

I need a list of Discovery missions from each of the competitions since the Discover Program commenced. Not including Lunar Prospector, for which I have plenty of information already. Can anybody help me out?

At a minimum I just need a list, I guess, but other information or sources would be very useful as well, as eventually I have to go there as well.

Phil

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

I can dig you up the complete set from the first solicitation -- but since then NASA has refused to provide a complete list of the Discovery proposals for any round, which means that all inquirers have had to do some digging. I'll see what has been come up with. (One of the more interesting was "Pele", Jeffrey Taylor's proposal, during the first round, of a lunar-adapted Soviet Marsokhod to land at Aristarchus and investigate its past volcanic activity. I have quite a bit of material on that.)

[Phil Stooke]

Thanks for this, Bruce.

I am compiling an atlas of lunar exploration. Past missions are basically finished now, and I am wrapping up the atlas with a look at other plans (such as Euromoon 2000 or Discovery) which did not happen.

I would like to include a brief mention - very brief - of all Moon-oriented Discovery proposals. Then, for any which proposed a specified landing site (even if only as an example of possible targets) or surface activities such as a rover route with sampling stops, I would like to illustrate that to the extent possible.

Any assistance would be sure to earn a big acknowledgement!

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

Following up on Bruce's comment, I can now confirm it - NASA has refused to release even a list of proposals for each competition to me.

Phil

[Bob Shaw]

Does anyone know *why* NASA is being secretive about the proposals? Is there some halfway rational explanation, or are they merely being precious?

[Phil Stooke]

Bob, I think a lot of what goes into a proposal - especially if there is a commercial partner - is proprietory.. from instrument or spacecraft design to observing strategies. But summaries of proposals, and science goals etc., really should not be, to my mind. Generally I find the people involved in the proposals are more forthcoming.

Phil

PS - it's OK, I was only kidding about not asking questions!

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

I haven't forgotten, Phil -- I've just been juggling several plates at once recently. I don't know why NASA withheld the proposals for the very first Discovery AO from you; they DID give that list in its entirety when they announced the four finalists. But other sources, such as one Space.com article, have provided the names and info on several lunar mission proposals during the next three rounds. I swear by the name of Arthur C. Clarke that I'll dig this information up for you. (For one thing, I haven't forgotten that fan letter you sent me a few years ago -- I don't get all that many, especially from Keith Cowing.)

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

First fruits of my labor already: I've got the list of 28 full-mission proposals for the first Discovery selection -- and they include 6 lunar missions. Besides Lunar Prospector and Pele, they were:

(1) Diana -- an odd mission, proposed by Chris Russell, which was a sort of early version of Dawn (and which made the cover of Aviation Week!). A SEP-powered orbiter equipped with instruments generally similar to Dawn's original payload would have spent 14 months mapping the Moon (and dropping off a small subsat for farside gravity mapping), then used its ion engines to leave the Moon, hit escape velocity, and rendezvous with the dried-out comet nucleus Wilson-Harrington.

(2) "Icy Moon Mission" (by Bruce Murray). A small lunar polar orbiter which, as its name suggests, would have used a radar scatterometer to look for polar ice deposits.

(3) "Interlune-1" (by Harrison Schmitt). Two lunar rovers -- one as tiny as Sojourner -- would have landed at the Apollo 15 site to reexamine its geology in more detail.

(4) "Lunar Discovery Orbiter" (by William Boynton). Basically a new version of the 1970s Lunar Polar Orbiter, but with fewer instruments.

I have more data on all these squirreled away somewhere -- I grilled almost all of the 28 Discovery proposers in this round, for an article I never got around to writing, and I still have all their mission descriptions squirreled away. I'll track those down, in addition to digging up that information I promised on later lunar Discovery proposals -- although that's a lot more scattered and fragmented, and it will take me a little while to chase down all of it that I remember seeing.

[garybeau]

(3)  "Interlune-1" (by Harrison Schmitt).  Two lunar rovers -- one as tiny as Sojourner -- would have landed at the Apollo 15 site to reexamine its geology in more detail.

Just a thought, could the technology already developed for the MER rovers be adapted for lunar excursion or would they have to be re-designed from the ground up? In the budget strapped era that we are in it would make sense to try and use technology that is already developed. The MER rovers are a quantum leap over the Sojourner style rover. Sure the bottom line is more expensive, but there is no comparison to the amount of science returned for that dollar using the MER rovers.
The biggest hurdle that I see would be contending with the 14 day long nights.
How do you keep your electronics and instruments warm for that long without going nuclear. But that would apply to any rover developed.

Why would we want to go back to the Apollo 15 site other than nostalgia? Surely we could learn more by going an unexplored area......such as the poles.

Gary

[Phil Stooke]

There was a fascinating proposal about the time of the end of Apollo to go back to the Apollo 15 site... Harvest Moon, it was called, planned by "The Committee for the Future" based in Connecticut, I think (I'm doing this from memory, my notes are all in my office, so I may be off). It was written up briefly in Aviation Week in 1973.

The plan was to solicit donations from around the world to fund a mission using left-over Apollo hardware. It would have set up an observatory, a greenhouse experiment, deployed a long-range remote controlled rover and so on at the Hadley-Apennine site. I think some samples might have been sold to help pay for the mission. The site might have been chosen especially because it was so visually appealing rather than for science purposes.

Personally, I'd love to know more about this proposal. It went nowhere of course.

I have found a few references to Interlune-1 now, not very detailed, but they seem to have been directed at Mare Tranquillitatis, Apollo 11 rather than Apollo 15. Schmitt has long been interested in Helium-3, and Mare Tranquillitatis seems to be a good place for it. Interlune-1 was specifically designed to further the study of Helium-3, at least in part. Am I getting this right, Bruce?

Garybeau - Since the landing would be completely different there would be no need to have a foldable rover... so wheels need not be so small... power is different... could be driven by real-time commands... I'd say there is so little in common that MER doesn't help lunar rovers very much.

Phil

[Jeff7]

How do you keep your electronics and instruments warm for that long without going nuclear. But that would apply to any rover developed.

As you hinted at, the MERs already use radioisotope heaters in the warm electroinics box.

I'd imagine the components would need only minor adaptations to make the rovers suitable for lunar exploration. Maybe a larger high gain antenna, as decent throughput direct-to-Earth communications should be quite possible at such short range. Something might need to be done with the TES though, as that can take damage at night from extreme cold. Should something happen similar to Opportunity's stuck switch, requiring deep sleep at night, which a lunar rover would likely need during the 14 day-long nights, the TES would freeze if it weren't properly adapted.

Another thought - it wouldn't require as much energy to drive, as the gravity's lighter. More power available for heaters? Possibly additional batteries could be used?

[Bob Shaw]

Standardised components *must* at some point save time and money - everything from established management systems through to hardware and designs should be used more than once. It's crazy to still be building unique vehicles at ever-higher cost rather than having at least a degree of commonality between them. I *won't* rant on about the good ol' Soviet approach to production lines, but I *could* if you get me going...

...I wonder how many good missions we've lost to date due to the infamous 'Not Invented Here' Syndrome?

[dvandorn]

There was a fascinating proposal about the time of the end of Apollo to go back to the Apollo 15 site... Harvest Moon, it was called, planned by "The Committee for the Future" based in Connecticut, I think (I'm doing this from memory, my notes are all in my office, so I may be off).  It was written up briefly in Aviation Week in 1973. 

The plan was to solicit donations from around the world to fund a mission using left-over Apollo hardware.  It would have set up an observatory, a greenhouse experiment, deployed a long-range remote controlled rover and so on at the Hadley-Apennine site.  I think some samples might have been sold to help pay for the mission.  The site might have been chosen especially because it was so visually appealing rather than for science purposes. 

Personally, I'd love to know more about this proposal.  It went nowhere of course.

Slightly OT here, the thing I always found fascinating about Harvest Moon was that it proposed to use the leftover CSM and LM from the *original* Apollo 15 mission, the H mission (45 hour stay time, no rover, two EVAs) that was canceled during the final round of mission cutbacks in 1970.

One reason it went nowhere was that the people who were trying to sponsor it costed it out by referencing declassified NASA budget lines, but they never discussed the possibility with NASA itself. They quickly discovered that while they *might* have a shot at buying surplus Apollo hardware, they'd have to arrange for the NASA Apollo "Army" to support such a flight, from the launch preparations and support at KSC through the crew training, flight operations support, etc., at MSC (now JSC), not to mention the millions of dollars worth of support NASA got from the Navy and Air Force. Not only was NASA unwilling to fly surplus hardware for a private company interested in profits, the armed forces weren't interested in supporting such a thing, either. So Harvest Moon died a-borning.

It also didn't help that the Harvest Moon people wanted to return the Apollo 15 crew itself to the Hadley-Appenine site, announcing that Scott, Irwin and Worden would fly the mission, and just after their announcement, the stamp scandal hit. NASA was NOT going to allow Scott and his crew to fly in space for them again, much less support anyone who was going to use their skills to make profits from sending them back to the Moon.

-the other Doug

[Phil Stooke]

Bob is certainly right about standardised components etc. Even identical missions would be worthwhile in many cases. Flying MERs to two new sites would be great for science and a bargain... two more Voyagers for launch in the 1980s would have been great too, even if all they had done was to Jupiter... more views of Io, different satellite encounters... but of course you need to plan for it from the start.

But attempts to do something along those lines - Mariner Mark II for instance, or CRAF/Cassini - have gone nowhere. It may be a product of the budget process. If the instruction was 'you can have X dollars a year for exploration, do as much as you can with it' there would be more incentive to do as much as possible.

But for the standardised component thing to be useful, there still has to be enough in common between the missions, and I'm not convinced that moon rovers and MER have that similarity. MSL might be more adaptable to the Moon with the advantage that it *could* be planned that way from the start.

Phil

[Bob Shaw]

Jim Irwin's dream about following old tracks at Hadley-Appenine might *almost* have come true, then!

(sigh)