Moonraker: De-Risking Lunar Landing Sites with High Resolution LiDAR

With renewed international interest in returning mankind to the Moon, safely landing both robotic and manned landers on the rough surface has become a critical challenge. Hazards such as small boulders, craters, and slopes can easily tip a lander and are often not visible in current elevation maps of the Moon. Today’s best topographic data comes from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, but this data has significant gaps and insufficient resolution to de-risk landing sites. A better understanding of topography near the lunar South Pole is especially important, since the terrain there is extremely rough and yet most future lander missions are targeting that region in the search for water ice in permanently shadowed regions.

The Moonraker mission will use a mapping LiDAR instrument to improve the state-of-the-art of lunar topographic maps, allowing mission planners to identify and de-risk landing sites for future missions. The Moonraker small satellite will operate at a 50 km altitude polar lunar orbit. Its LiDAR payload will have a 1X zoom mode and an 8X zoom mode. The instrument’s 1X mode will generate wide-area 3D maps of the Moon’s polar regions (60°S-90°S and 60°N-90°N) with 4 m ground sample distance (GSD) to aid mission planners in landing site selection. The 8X mode will be used to scan individual landing sites at 0.5 m GSD, enabling small hazards such as boulders and craters to be identified. The data will be downlinked directly to Earth and processed into digital elevation models (DEMs).

Moonraker is currently in a Phase A study, funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) within a new initiative on Small Missions for Exploration, and its inception “Destination the Moon”.