Jon Goff has a blog post on a recent FISO telecon. One of the implications for all of these options, of course, is that SLS makes no sense.
5 thoughts on “Useful Cislunar Orbits”
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Jon Goff has a blog post on a recent FISO telecon. One of the implications for all of these options, of course, is that SLS makes no sense.
Comments are closed.
Yes, but does Jon Goff have a post on cis-genders? I thought not, I thought not. What a patriarchal world we live in.
Here is the link to the article.
http://selenianboondocks.com/2016/04/lunar-orbital-facility-location-options/
Does that guy sleep?! I estimate is an order of magnitude more productive than I am.
Pug,
I’ve been less busy than I’d like recently, so I figured I’d try to work through some of my backlog of blog posts. 🙂
~Jon
That NRO orbit may be of interest soon. It brings any vehicle close over either pole of the Moon. Rohan sood, at Perdue, has published a proposal for using a lunar orbiting ground penetrating radar, with a similar orbit, that instead has a perilune of 10 kilometers over the lunar nearside.
It would be used for confirming the presence of lunar lava tubes suggested in the recent GRAIL data all over the lunar nearside. You’d spend the trip to and from apilune to correct the mascon disturbances to such a close orbit with an ion engine whose power source would power the radar during each close pass. You could get resolution down from at best 1000 meters from GRAIL data to 10 meters or less with a large enough radar aperture.
Where the NRO orbit comes in would be in finding lava tubes near the poles, which could be excellent cold sinks for cometary ices, and far more easily mined than the crater deposits presently spoken about. I don’t yet know how much delta Vee is needed to switch from nearside close orbit to close orbit with perilune at the poles, but it would be a good thing to know.