Abstract
Chang’E-5 will be China’s first sample−return mission. The proposed landing site is at the late-Eratosthenian-aged Rümker region of the lunar nearside. During this mission, a driller will be sunk into the lunar regolith to collect samples from depths up to two meters. This mission provides an ideal opportunity to investigate the lunar regolith temperature variation, which is important to the drilling program. This study focuses on the temperature variation of lunar regolith, especially the subsurface temperature. Such temperature information is crucial to both the engineering needs of the drilling program and interpretation of future heat-flow measurements at the lunar landing site. Based on the real-time illumination, and particularly the terrain obscuration, a one-dimensional heat equation was applied to estimate the temperature variation over the whole landing region. Our results confirm that while solar illumination strongly affects the surface temperature, such effect becomes weak at increasing depths. The skin depth of diurnal temperature variations is restricted to the uppermost ~5 cm, and the temperature of regolith deeper than ~0.6 m is controlled by the interior heat flow. At such a depth, China’s future lunar exploration is adequate to measure the inner heat flow, considering the drilling depth will be close to 2 m.
Highlights
The Rümker region is located in the northern Oceanus Procellarum (Figure 1) and is the proposed candidate landing region for the Chang’E-5 mission [1,2,3,4], since this region has a long and complex volcanic history
We studied the lunar regolith temperature variation in the proposed Rümker landing region of Chang’E-5 mission (CE-5)
We investigated the real-time illumination based on the NASA’s SPICE system
Summary
The Rümker region is located in the northern Oceanus Procellarum (Figure 1) and is the proposed candidate landing region for the Chang’E-5 mission [1,2,3,4], since this region has a long and complex volcanic history. In the forthcoming Chang’E-5 mission (CE-5), the lander will carry a driller to the lunar regolith in order to collect regolith samples up to 2 kg. The penetration depth is planned to reach 2 m [5,6]. This mission will not intend to probe subsurface heat flow, but will still permit exploration of the subsurface regolith thermal properties of the moon. The lunar subsurface temperature was directly measured during the Apollo missions [7]. Samples returned from these missions suggest depth-dependent density and thermal properties [8]. In addition to in situ measurements, thermal infrared data from lunar orbiters have been used to investigate the thermal properties of the lunar regolith [9,10,11,12,13]
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