Science and Exploration at the Moon and Mars Enabled by Surface Telerobotics

Jack O. Burns, Terry Fong, David A. Kring, William D. Pratt, Timothy Cichan
(Submitted on 26 May 2017)

NASA/ESA are preparing a series of Exploration Missions using Orion and additional infrastructure at a Deep Space Gateway in cis-lunar space. This will provide an opportunity for science and exploraiton from the lunar farside facilitated by surface telerobotics. We describe several precursor telepresence experiments, using the ISS and a student-built rover, which are laying the groundwork for teleoperation of rovers on the Moon and eventually Mars. We describe exciting near-term science that can be conducted from the lunar farside with teleoperated rovers including an astronaut-assisted sample return, a high priority from the U.S. Planetary Science Decadal Survey, and the deployment of a low frequency radio telescope array to observe the first stars and galaxies (Cosmic Dawn), as described in NASA’s Astrophysics Roadmap.

Comments:    10 pages, 7 figures
Subjects:    Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as:    arXiv:1705.09692 [astro-ph.IM]
     (or arXiv:1705.09692v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Submission history
From: Jack Burns
[v1] Fri, 26 May 2017 19:35:12 GMT (1009kb)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.09692