Prospecting for Polar Volatiles: Results from the Resolve Field

Introduction: Both the Moon and Mercury evidently host ice and other volatile compounds in cold traps at the planets’ poles. Determining the form, spatial distribution, and abundance of these volatiles at the lunar poles can help us understand how and when they were delivered and emplaced. This bears directly on the delivery of water and prebiotic compounds to the inner planets over the solar system’s history, and also informs plans for utilizing the volatiles as resources for sustained human exploration as well as the commercial development of space. Temperature models and orbital data suggest nearsurface volatile concentrations may exist at polar locations not strictly in permanent shadow. Remote operation of a robotic lunar rover mission for the 7-10 days of available sunlight would permit key questions to be answered. But such a short, quick-tempo mission has unique challenges and requires a new concept of operations. Both science and rover operations decisionmaking must be done in real time, requiring immediate situational awareness, data analysis, and decision support tools. RESOLVE Prototype and Mission Simulation: The Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen & Lunar Volatile Extraction (RESOLVE) project aims to demonstrate in situ resource utilization (ISRU). RESOLVE is developing a rover borne payload that (1) can locate near subsurface volatiles, (2) excavate and analyze samples of the volatile-bearing regolith, and (3) demonstrate the form, extractability and usefulness of the materials. Here we describe an analog field demonstration of the prospecting approach RESOLVE would use for lunar mission. To meet mission requirements, a third generation RESOLVE payload and rover was developed and used in a roughly one-week field exercise simulating a mission. The mission simulation was performed in July 2012 at 2470-m elevation on the south flank of Mauna Kea, in the vicinity of Pu’u Haiwahine (+19° 45' 41.09"N, -155° 28' 4.86"E). The test was carried out from a Mission Operations Center (MOC) located at Hale Pohaku about 1.3 km to the east (+19° 45' 41.46"N, -155° 27' 20.86"E). Additional support was provided by networked teams at NASA Ames Research Center, the Canadian Space Agency, NASA KSC and JSC. Site Preparation: The test site was cleared of vegetation to the maximum extent possible, and targets were placed along the pre-planned traverse paths. The traverse plans were developed on the basis of interesting features identified in orbital imagery; after arrival in Hawai’i, a subset of the team emplaced targets. To avoid the difficulties of using water ice as prospecting targets, buried polyethylene sheets were used as ice proxies. Other materials (eg., camouflage netting) were used for near-IR targets. It was not practical to populate the entire test site with randomly distributed