Multi-Functional Lunar Surface Service Hubs

The Artemis program intends to return humans to the Moon. With it, there has been significant international and commercial participation through mission plans for robotic landers, rovers, surface instruments, and human support systems. Many of these planned missions are intended to operate during a lunar day lasting no more than 14 Earth days. This is due to the engineering complexity of developing lunar hardware to survive the lunar night, in which temperatures can drop below-150^oC for 14 days. This paper presents an integrated service hub that will store, recharge, and warm up small surface rovers, instruments, and other lunar surface vehicles at temperatures of 10-20 °C throughout the lunar night. The service hub would consist of inflatables and reinforced using RCUs or ‘smart sandbags’ and one or more towers integrated with solar panels for power generation, lighting, an integrated computing server, a data backup server, and communication antennas and receivers to permit short-range high-bandwidth communications. We consider two variations of the concept: one consisting of inflatable elements and the other of smart sandbags. The smart sandbags have integrated temperature, radiation, and IMU sensors that permit long-duration monitoring of the service hub's structural and thermal health. The “smart sandbags” would form this thermal and structural shelter at the base of this hub and house critical electronics, computers, and batteries that are otherwise sensitive to temperature.