Instant Landing Pads for Lunar Missions

You are here: Homepage > Search

Instant Landing Pads for Lunar Missions

Kuhns, Matthew / Metzger, Philip / Hasnain, Zohaib / Zacny, Kris

For large lunar landers carrying astronauts, the engine plumes may pose a range of risks, from high-velocity ejecta abrasion damaging the lander to ejecta damaging other lunar landers or orbital assets, or even creating a crater under the lander as deep as the columnated engine plume. Artemis landers propose a landed mass of ∼20–60 mT versus the ∼10 mT Apollo lunar module, which means larger plumes. One solution to this problem is lunar landing pad structures to safely land on. Current methods for landing pad creation use precursor missions to the Moon to set up the infrastructure. The Masten in-Flight Alumina Spray Technique (FAST) Landing Pad changes the approach to landing on planetary bodies by mitigating the landing plume effects by creating a landing pad under the lander as it descends onto a surface. This removes the need for a precursor mission and saves cost and schedule while mitigating the landing plume effects. This approach uses engineered particles injected into the rocket plume to build up a coating over the regolith at the landing location. The hardened regolith would have greater thermal resistance and ablation resistance to reduce regolith erosion rates and deep cratering. This innovation would enable large and small landers to safely perform transportation to any region on the Moon without major risks posed by engine plume effects. This paper will discuss progress on FAST landing pads made through the NASA NIAC program.