Abstract
Asteroid mining offers vital sources for improving human lives and provides opportunities for interplanetary missions and space travel. There are many professional commercial space companies that are only investing billions of dollars on asteroids mining, but prior to that, one condition for asteroid mining could be planetary stations to refuel the pioneers’ spacecraft or human colonies on alien planets; hence, one of the vital sources for these purposes is water. Water can be harvested to split oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for refueling spaceships’ propulsions, and Earth-to-space water payload transporting is extremely expensive; therefore, discovering extraterrestrial water in outer space is economically beneficial. This paper presents a Lunar CubeSat Injector to deliver four 3U CubeSats into Low Lunar Orbit to make a constellation to identify locations of water sources on the Moon by using a THz heterodyne-spectrometer. In sum, this project can help scientists to recognize more water resources for those who will colonize the Moon and for those planning to go beyond it.
Highlights
There are millions of asteroids in our solar system, comprising a larger source of minerals than what is present on Earth
We already have LUMIO built by European Space Agency [27] and MarCO built by NASA Jet Propulation laboratory [28], CubeSats for prospecting of the Moon and Mars, respectively, but our project is proposing the followed prospective beneficiaries: (1) using CubeSats for deep space missions, (2) developing the CubeSat constellation for interplanetary missions, and (3) providing return samples capability from other planets
We proposed an interplanetary mission with a cargo Microsatellite
Summary
There are millions of asteroids in our solar system, comprising a larger source of minerals than what is present on Earth. Water on the Moon’s surface can provide oxygen for breathing, fuel for propellants, and life support; water is a fundamental need when it comes to living on alien planets, asteroids, natural satellites, etc This precious liquid has a very good sign at the THz frequency range. In [15], a high-performance, low-power-consumption, integrated THz Schottky receiver is presented for CubeSats, which is a multilayer receiver with approximate dimensions of 25 × 25 × 40 mm and mass less than 250 g This multi-frequency receiver operates at 557 GHz and 1100–1200 GHz. This multi-frequency receiver operates at 557 GHz and 1100–1200 GHz These frequency ranges provide an excellent indication of ice water [16]. We present mission objectives, continue on mission scenario, and at the end, we present the satellite project system with a THz radiometer for detecting ice water on the Moon for creating the generation of deep space exploration by using small satellites [17,18,19,20,21,22]
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