Lunar dust effects can have a significant impact on the performance and maintenance of future exploration life support systems. Filtration systems will be challenged by the additional loading from lunar dust, and mitigation technology and strategies have to be adapted to protect sensitive equipment. An initial characterization of lunar dust and simulants was undertaken. The data emphasize the i...

[1] We report observations by the dual-probe Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon’s Interaction with the Sun (ARTEMIS) mission of Moon-related electron and ion signatures obtained above the dayside lunar surface in the terrestrial magnetotail lobes. While the Moon is often thought of as a passive absorber, recent observations from Kaguya, Chandrayaan, Chang’E, ...

Introduction: With NASA’s return to the Moon, the determination of safe landing sites for future robotic and human missions is crucial, and rock abundance will be important criteria for landing site selection. Thermal inertias derived from remote sensing in the thermal infrared is a powerful technique for assessing rock abundance for the purpose of landing site selection on Mars [1,2]. Rocks a ...

Analysis of Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) data provides science results: gravitational physics and ephemeris information from the orbit, lunar science from rotation and solidbody tides, and Earth science. Science from the orbit: Sensitive tests of gravitational physics include the Equivalence Principle, limits on the time variation of the gravitational constant G, and geodetic precession. The equiv...

Unified Lunar Topographic Model B. A. Archinal, M. R. Rosiek, R. L. Kirk, and B. L. Redding .........................................................................27 Update on the Unified Lunar Control Network 2005 B. A. Archinal, M. R. Rosiek, R. L. Kirk, and B. L. Redding .........................................................................28 The Crux Seismic Profiler for Shallow Soundi...

Data from lunar samples (Apollo, Luna, and lunar meteorites) indicate that the Moon was subjected to an intense period of bombardment around 3.85 billion year ago (Ga). Here a short review of this topic is given. Different interpretations exist, which either take this as the tail end of an intense but declining accretion period, or which consider a spike in the accretion rate at that time. The ...

In this paper, we model the reflectance of the lunar regolith by a new method combining Monte Carlo ray tracing and Hapke's model. The existing modeling methods exploit either a radiative transfer model or a geometric optical model. However, the measured data from an Interference Imaging spectrometer (IIM) on an orbiter were affected not only by the composition of minerals but also by the envir...

A total lunar eclipse is conjectured to have influence on the physical conditions of an environmental area, particularly on the brightness of the sky. The phenomenon might also be relevant on weather parameters change on Earth, such as temperature, humidity and pressure, though a straightforward correlation is not easy to establish. This work mainly aims at measuring the brightness of the sky a...

This study investigates various models to represent the gross geometric shape of the Moon. Asymmetric polyaxial geometric modelsnamely three-, fourand six-axial lunar figure are compared and contrasted with the axially symmetric three-axis ellipsoidal model derived from Chang'e 1 and SELENE laser altimetry data. All solutions confirm a hydrostatically stable lunar shape shifted with respect to ...