Lander Systems for Planetary Missions

Abstract

By landing unmanned or manned research stations on the surface of planets, moons, comets and asteroids in-situ characterization of these bodies becomes possible. Typically the scientific objective of lander missions includes measurements selected from the following list: - generation of images for studying morphological properties of the site and for obtaining mineralogical information (multispectral imaging) - chemical analysis of surface matter : bulk elementral abundance isotopes, minerals, ices, carbonaceous compounds, organic, volatiles - determination of structure and phyical properties of the surface: topography, texture, roughness, regolith scales, mechanical, electrical, optical, and thermal properties, temperatures. - measurements characterizing local depht structure (stratigraphy), and global internal structure. This chapter will overwiew performed and planned Lander missions concentrating on unmanned missions. The Apollo manned lunar landing programme is not covered here since its methodology is not directly applicable to unmanned missions (An excellent reference on the vast variety of Apollo in-situ instruments, covering the various hand-operated geology tool as well as the sophisticated ALSEP packages, is given in (Heiken et al., editors, 1991). As an example for a current unmanned Lander design, which is well known to the authors, the Rosetta Lander will be described in some more detail. Devices for mobility and subsurface sampling increasing the scientific potential of lander missions will be overviewed.