"LUNA GLOB" – THE FIRST PHASE OF RUSSIAN MOON EXPLORATION PROGRAM
- Paper ID
6951
- author
- company
Lavochkin Association
- country
Russian Federation
- year
2010
- abstract
Lavochkin Association has a great positive experience in spacecraft development and realization of the Moon exploratory missions. Already in the seventies there were developed and launched automatic lunar vehicles which provided soft landing on the Moon surface, creation of the Moon artificial satellites, taking of the Moon soil samples and their delivery to the Earth, delivery of moon rovers to the Moon surface. Nowadays it is proposed a concept providing step-by-step accumulation of automatic technical vehicles in the near-Moon space and on the Moon surface up to construction of an automatic lunar polygon with the following extension of scope of investigations. "Luna-Glob" is the first phase of the Russian Moon exploration program (the SC launch is scheduled in 2012) including orbital and landing vehicle(s). Key scientific tasks of the "Luna-Glob" project are the following: - obtaining of scientific results of the world-wide importance about the internal structure of the Moon; - minerals reconnaissance; - investigation of impact on the Moon of transmitted corpuscular and electromagnetic radiation. Scientific complex LORD (Lunar Orbital Radiowave Detector) installed on the orbiter is a subject of particular interest. Main task of the complex is search and registration of space rays and neutrino of ultra-high energies exceeding threshold of Greisen-Zatsepin-Kouzmin (~ 51019 eV). Besides that it is supposed to investigate lunar seismic activity, near-Moon space plasma and to carry out monitoring of micrometeorite and dust fluxes. Within the framework of the project along with the near-Moon orbit investigations it is also considered a possibility to carry out in-situ explorations on the Moon surface with the help of lunar penetrators or small landing station.