NASA shares its lunar 'pallet lander' concept with industry
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An artist’s rendering of NASA’s “pallet lander” system. Credit: NASA
NASA recently released a technical paper for a mid-sized “pallet lander” system it hopes industry can develop in order to send payload, such as a robotic rover, to the Moon’s south pole.
According to NASA, multiple agency centers contributed to the design and it hopes industry can use part or all of the concept in the Commercial Lunar Payloads Services program, also called CLPS.
“This lander was designed with simplicity in mind to deliver a 300-kilogram rover to a lunar pole," Logan Kennedy, the project's lead systems engineer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, said in a news release. "We used single string systems, minimal mechanisms and existing technology to reduce complexity, though advancements in precision landing were planned to avoid hazards and to benefit rover operations. We keep the rover alive through transit and landing so it can go do its job.”
According to the paper, the pallet lander would launch atop a commercial launch vehicle. The rocket’s upper stage would place the lander system on a trajectory toward the Moon.
Once at the Moon, a solid rocket motor would perform a breaking burn to place it into lunar orbit. From there, the motor would detach and the lander would do the rest of the work to get to its surface destination.
“As robotic lunar landers grow to accommodate larger payloads, simple but high-performing landers with a contiguous payload volume will be needed,” Kennedy said. “We hope that other lander designers can benefit from our work.”
All of this is part of the agency’s broader Artemis program, which aims to put the first woman and the next man on the Moon’s surface by 2024. In addition to precursor science missions under the CLPS program, NASA is working with industry to build a small outpost in an elliptical orbit around the Moon.
This Lunar Gateway, which is designed to be a destination for astronauts aboard an Orion spacecraft to meet up with a human-rated landing system, can also be used for deep-space science and as a place to test systems needed for future crewed missions to Mars and beyond.
