Design and development of volatile analysis system for analog field test of lunar exploration mission

The recent evidence of water in the lunar crater Cabeus from the LCROSS mission (Colaprete et al., 2010) provides confirmation of a valuable resource on the lunar surface. To understand this resource and the impact it can have on future exploration, further information is needed on the distribution and availability of the water ice. The Lunar Advanced Volatile Analysis (LAVA) subsystem is a part of the Regolith & Environment Science and Oxygen & Lunar Volatile Extraction (RESOLVE) payload, designed to provide ground truth to the volatile distribution near the permanently shadowed regions on the lunar surface. The payload is designed to drill and extract a regolith core sample, heat the regolith to drive off the volatiles, and identify and quantify the volatile resources. The LAVA subsystem is specifically responsible for processing and analyzing the volatile gas sample from the lunar regolith sample. The main objective of this paper is to provide insight into the operations and hardware for volatile analysis developed and deployed at the 2012 RESOLVE Field Test on the slopes of Mauna Kea. The vision of employing Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) and modified COTS hardware to lower the cost for mission-enabling field tests will be highlighted. This paper will discuss how the LAVA subsystem hardware supported several high level RESOLVE mission objectives to demonstrate the challenging lunar mission concept proposed.