Passive Thermal Analysis and Regulation for a Lightweight Lunar CubeRover

Remote-control robotic vehicles have been used to explore astronomical bodies since the Russian Lunokhod 1 lunar rover began exploring the Sea of Rains on the Moon in November, 1970. Advances in microelectronics in subsequent decades have enabled development and production of increasingly capable robotic platforms for conducting scientific research off of our home planet. Most successful efforts, so far, have focused on the development of rovers on the order of hundreds of kilograms in weight, such as NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, the Soviet Union’s Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2, and China’s Yutu 1 and Yutu 2 Moon rovers, and NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover. Lighter designs, on the order of 10 kilograms in weight, have also been proposed and developed, but only one has been successfully deployed and operated to date: NASA’s Sojourner Mars rover in 1997. We present the thermal analysis of a lunar CubeRover, on the order of 1 kilogram in weight, currently under NASA contract and being developed by Carnegie Mellon University and the Pittsburgh-based company, Astrobotic.

The CubeRover is envisioned as a lightweight, mass-produced, modular rover, which offers considerable benefits in the reduction of development, production, and launch costs, mission flexibility, and programmatic risk mitigation. Rovers of such low weight present unique challenges in the development of an integrated thermal management solution, since they cannot rely on heavy thermal control systems which enable active cooling or heating of temperature sensitive components. Several independent methods used to develop thermal models of the lightweight CubeRover design in spaceflight and lunar surface operation thermal environments are presented, along with computational results. The benefits and limitations of each method are discussed, and recommended future work is outlined.