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Small Satellites With Micro-Propulsion For Communications With The Lunar South Pole Aitkens Basin, Samudra E. Haque, Jeremy Straub, David Whalen
Small Satellites With Micro-Propulsion For Communications With The Lunar South Pole Aitkens Basin, Samudra E. Haque, Jeremy Straub, David Whalen
Jeremy Straub
A lunar sample return mission to the Lunar South-Pole Aitkens Basin (LSPAB) has been highlighted as a high priority objective of the most recent (2011) Decadal Survey for Planetary Science, by the National Research Council. This class of mission, however, faces a dramatic communications limitation, due to the lack of a frequent, or continuous, line-of-sight communications path to Earthbased ground stations. Brunner and others have proposed a communications system utilizing Low Lunar Polar Orbits (LLPO) and Lunar Halo orbits for this purpose. Ely and others have outlined proposals for using several communication satellites to form a relay network using LLPO, …