Industry space planners are scoping out next steps beyond low Earth orbit – but with a trajectory twist: Exploring the Moon’s hidden farside from the L2 Lagrange Point.
Stationed in that L2 slot a piloted spacecraft would be synchronized with the Moon in its orbit around the Earth. By being there, the spacecraft appears to hover over the farside of the Moon.
The farside of the Moon has been mapped from orbit, but no humans or robots have ever landed there.
An L2 “Halo Orbit” would be utilized by a crewed L2 orbiting facility – a facility that makes use of the Orion spacecraft designed by Lockheed Martin Space Systems – a craft already imbued with the advanced features needed for lunar flights, such as extended duration power generation and life support systems, protection from micrometeoroids and radiation, and high-speed reentry back to Earth capability.
As outlined by Josh Hopkins in the Human Spaceflight Advanced Programs office for Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company near Denver, Colorado, the farside mission would permit astronauts to remotely control robots on the lunar surface. One task would be to gather multiple rock samples from the Moon’s South Pole-Aitken basin, a first step in rocketing back to Earth the “hand” picked specimens.
Additionally, these astronaut-run robots could deploy a low-frequency radio telescope on the farside. That radio telescope array would be shielded from Earth’s radio buzz and static.
Another attractive feature of this type of mission, Hopkins points out, is sharpening skills in teleoperation, an ability that would be used to explore Mars via robotic means by a crew circling the red planet. Also, the L2-Farside Mission is seen as a stepping stone training effort that also enables human sojourns to select asteroids.
By Leonard David