The Lunar IceCube EM-1 Mission: Prospecting the Moon for Water Ice

Lunar IceCube is a 6U CubeSat designed to prospect for water in solid, liquid, and vapor forms and other lunar volatiles from a low-perigee, highly inclined lunar orbit. The mission was selected through NASA's Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships program for a flight opportunity on Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1) and supported by NASA's Advanced Exploration Systems (AES). The mission is a partnership between Morehead State University, NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center (GSFC), Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and Busek Space Propulsion Company. Lunar IceCube will be deployed by the Space Launch System (SLS) and use an innovative RF ion engine to achieve lunar capture and the science orbit to investigate the distribution of water ice and other volatiles. These volatile distributions will be investigated contextually, as a function of time of day, latitude, and regolith minerology. Lunar IceCube includes the broadband infrared compact high resolution exploration spectrometer (BIRCHES) developed by GSFC. The mission, described in this paper, will complement the science of other EM-1 missions including Lunar Flashlight and LunaH-Map by focusing on the abundance, location, and transportation physics of water ice on the lunar surface at a variety of latitudes, thus not restricted to permanently shadowed regions (PSRs). Lunar IceCube will include radiation-hardened custom and modified commercially available subsystems, the JPL Iris transponder, a high power solar array and an innovative electric propulsion system that generates significant delta-v (> 1.2 km/s)—an enabling technology that will make this and other interplanetary CubeSat science missions feasible. The 13 secondary EM-1 CubeSats will usher in a new era of solar system exploration with small satellite platforms.