AOPP Seminar - Targeting Intermittently Sunlit Regions with Stable Water ice Conditions for Landed Missions at the South Polar Region of the Moon

Intermittently sunlit areas near the lunar south pole are estimated to harbor thermal conditions permitting long-term stability of water ice and other volatiles. Landing site selection for any surface mission typically involves optimizing a balance between quantities or criteria that indicate the extent to which the mission's objectives can be met or exceeded. Oftentimes, a first step is to filter out unviable landing sites by applying operational or engineering requirements to environmental or terrain characteristics. The remaining areas of terrain that meet a set of requirements may be described as “compliant”. First, I’m going to present a regional-scale landing site assessment with two mission scenarios of varying strictness where we identified terrains in the lunar south polar region (80°S to the South Pole) that are compliant with sets of generic engineering (slopes, average Earth visibility, average solar illumination) and scientific (stable water ice) requirements and performed a probabilistic analysis to determine the likelihood of successfully landing and operating on such locations. Second, at the local scale, the methodology is refined for application to search for candidate landing sites for ESA’s PROSPECT mission, incorporating higher-resolution datasets and time-dependent analyses of illumination and Earth visibility. Candidate sites are evaluated using a science-driven scoring matrix to ensure alignment with mission objectives. This multi-scale framework provides a systematic approach to identifying optimal landing locations that balance engineering constraints with scientific priorities in the exploration of lunar water ice.