Lunar Exploration Roadmap: Exploring the Moon in the 21st Century: Themes, Goals, Objectives, Investigations, and Priorities
The Lunar Exploration Roadmap: Exploring the Moon in the 21st Century: Themes, Goals, Objectives, Investigations, and Priorities, 2009 – A Community Endeavor Coordinated by the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG)
VERSION 1.0 DRAFT Full Roadmap
The Lunar Exploration Roadmap Version 1.0 is the first version of a living document that will be updated and further developed over time as more data becomes available from current missions, as further analyses by LEAG Specific Action Teams impact the roadmap, and as other relevant analyses are reported. The Lunar Exploration Roadmap Version 1.0 should not be considered as final and suggestions for revisions can be given to the LEAG Chair, the LEAG Executive Secretary or via the email address at the LEAG website (http://www.lpi.usra.edu/leag).
The three themes described below and in the companion Excel spreadsheet, are at various degrees of fidelity. The Science Theme has a long heritage of study, including NRC studies, and represents community consensus. The Feed Forward Theme has been presented to the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group and their comments have been incorporated. The Sustainability Theme is at the lowest fidelity, representing a small (but growing) body of opinion, and will require refinements, which will begin at the 2009 LEAG Annual Meeting.
Overall the roadmap is intended to layout an integrated and sustainable plan for lunar exploration that will allow NASA to transition from the Moon to Mars (and beyond) without abandoning the lunar assets built up using tax payer dollars. As such, the roadmap will enable commercial development, through early identification of “commercial on ramps”, that will create wealth and jobs to offset the initial investment of the taxpayer. In addition, the roadmap will, with careful planning, enable international cooperation to expand our scientific and economic spheres of influence while enabling an expansion of human and robotic space exploration.
The Lunar Exploration Roadmap builds upon previous work over the last several decades that has been devoted to lunar exploration. It does not represent a reinvention of past efforts to return to the Moon, but rather it incorporates these efforts into an integrated plan for sustained plan for lunar exploration. The roadmap has traceability back to such documents as:
- The Report from the Lunar Geoscience Observer Workshop (1986);
- The Status and Future of Lunar Geoscience (1986);
- A Site Selection Strategy for a Lunar Outpost: Science and Operational Parameters (1990);
- Geoscience and a Lunar Base: A Comprehensive Plan for Lunar Exploration (1990);
- A Planetary Science Strategy for the Moon by the Lunar Exploration Science Working Group (LExSWG, 1992);
- Lunar Surface Exploration Strategy (LExSWG, 1995);
- New Frontiers in the Solar System: An Integrated Exploration Strategy (2003) (Decadal Survey);
- A Renewed Spirit of Discovery: The President’s Vision for US Space Exploration (2004);
- The Vision for Space Exploration (2004);
- Solar and Space Physics and its Role in Space Exploration (NRC Report) (2004)
- US National Space Policy (2006);
- New Views of the Moon (2006);
- LEAG GEO-SAT (2006);
- Proceedings of the Conference on Astrophysics Enabled by the Return to the Moon (2006)
- The Global Exploration Strategy: The Framework for Coordination (2007);
- NASA Advisory Council Workshop on Science Associated with the Lunar Exploration Architecture, Tempe, AZ (2007);
- National Research Council: The Scientific Context for Exploration of the Moon (2007).
The Lunar Exploration Roadmap is a hierarchical document that is comprised of three themes with
subsequent goals, objectives, and investigations or initiatives (where appropriate). The three themes
address the question “Why are we going back to the Moon?” and focus on Science, Feed Forward (to
Mars and beyond) capabilities, and Sustainability (see below).
There are a number of cross cutting themes that permeate throughout all three main themes:
- Learn to live and work successfully on another world.
- Expand Earth’s economic sphere to encompass the Moon, and pursue lunar activities with direct benefits to life on Earth.
- Strengthen existing and create new global partnerships.
- Engage, inspire, and educate the public.
This document is arranged by theme where the goals, objectives and investigations are outlined for each theme. The objectives and investigations are, where possible, prioritized and time phased. Next, the time phasings and prioritizations are used to create the roadmap (in the companion Excel spreadsheet). Time Phasing Criteria In many cases, Investigations and Objectives have been time phased using Early Stage, Middle Stage, and Late Stage. Definitions of these terms are:
EARLY: Robotic precursors and up to the second human landing (less than or equal to 1 lunar day).
MIDDLE: Initial outpost build-up to including stays of 1 lunar day and including part of the lunar night, as well as Robotic missions.
LATE: Outpost established, stays of >30 days, including Robotic missions. In the discussion of the various Themes, time phasing and prioritization of the Objectives and Investigations are given. If the Investigations under a given Objective have variable prioritizations and time phasings, these will be given for each Investigation. Investigation prioritization and time phasing will not be given if they are all the same as those for the Objective. For roadmapping efforts, the Early Stage has been subdivided into pre-Early (Robotic Precursor Missions) and Early (Robotic & Short Human Sortie <=1 Lunar Day). Prioritization Criteria
Low, medium, and high prioritizations have been assigned by the LEAG roadmapping team to the Objectives and Investigations in terms of what we have interpreted, through contact with leaders in the community, as general thinking of how particular science communities (i.e., Earth Observing, Heliophysics, and Astrophysics) could best use the Moon. For lunar science, we defer to the NRC (2007) Scientific Context for the Exploration of the Moon report for prioritization of science concepts and goals, which specifically studied the issue of prioritization. The priorities are intended to help gauge, within the range of uses of the Moon that have been proposed over the years within these communities, which concepts appear to offer the most promise.
Low Priority: Would be good to do, but is not essential for habitat/exploration development; Would only give an incremental advance to our scientific knowledge; and/or Could be conducted more efficiently elsewhere.
Medium Priority: Falls in between Low and High Priority. Could be enabled with sufficient infrastructure investment.
High Priority: Is essential to do in order to make progress in habitat/exploration development; Would facilitate a fundamental advance in our scientific knowledge; Is facilitated by or should be facilitated by the Lunar Architecture; and/or Is best done on the lunar surface.
Given these criteria, an integrated roadmap is being developed that maps between themes and shows how objectives/investigations in one theme impact those in another. As an example of this, Objective Sci-A-4 (Understand the dynamical evolution and space weathering of the regolith), a high priority objective, is taken as a starting point (Figure 1):
