Abstract
The Earth's moon is currently an object of interest of many space agencies for unmanned robotic missions within this decade. Besides future prospects for building lunar gateways as support to human space flight, the Moon is an attractive location for scientific purposes. Not only will its study give insight on the foundations of the Solar System but also its location, uncontaminated by the Earth's ionosphere, represents a vantage point for the observation of the Sun and planetary bodies outside the Solar System. Lunar exploration has been traditionally conducted by means of single-agent robotic assets, which is a limiting factor for the return of scientific missions. The German Aerospace Center (DLR) is developing fundamental technologies towards increased autonomy of robotic explorers to fulfil more complex mission tasks through cooperation. This paper presents an overview of past, present and future activities of DLR towards highly autonomous systems for scientific missions targeting the Moon and other planetary bodies. The heritage from the Mobile Asteroid Scout (MASCOT), developed jointly by DLR and CNES and deployed on asteroid Ryugu on 3 October 2018 from JAXA's Hayabusa2 spacecraft, inspired the development of novel core technologies towards higher efficiency in planetary exploration. Together with the lessons learnt from the ROBEX project (2012–2017), where a mobile robot autonomously deployed seismic sensors at a Moon analogue site, this experience is shaping the future steps towards more complex space missions. They include the development of a mobile rover for JAXA's Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) in 2024 as well as demonstrations of novel multi-robot technologies at a Moon analogue site on the volcano Mt Etna in the ARCHES project. Within ARCHES, a demonstration mission is planned from the 14 June to 10 July 2021,1 during which heterogeneous teams of robots will autonomously conduct geological and mineralogical analysis experiments and deploy an array of low-frequency antennas to measure Jovian and solar bursts.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Astronomy from the Moon: the next decades'.
Highlights
Is developing fundamental technologies towards increased autonomy of robotic explorers to fulfil more complex mission tasks through cooperation
We have presented an overview of past, present and future missions where DLR developed fundamental core technologies towards increased robotic autonomy in scientific planetary missions
We discussed our contribution to two actual space missions as well as two large-scale test campaigns in a Moon analogue environment, presenting both our past experiences as well as ongoing preparations for future missions for each of the two categories
Summary
The exploration of the satellites of our solar planets to answer fundamental scientific questions has long been a desire of mankind. Robots have great potential to realize future planetary exploration missions They help us reach solar objects and enlarge the potential operational space, without putting human lives at risk. This station shall serve as a signal relay to surface activities, but could host operators and supply materials, which leads to different communication capabilities and robotic operational concepts These semi-autonomous functionalities help to tackle many problems of robotic planetary exploration, they are not able to replace a technical skilled human in the loop. This makes it difficult to have missions, which are beyond a robust enough communication link to execute basic commands and monitor the robots status, as would be the case in missions to our ice moons of Saturn and Jupiter [1]. We describe our ongoing ARCHES project and the future mission Martian Moons eXploration (MMX), which will send a rover to the Martian moon Phobos
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