[BRIEF NOTE] The Ceres Polar Lander

[rfmcdonald]

Will Baird's The Dragon's Tales is a wonderful blog, full of space news and biological studies and many other things, like, say, his impending second child. Thanks are also due him, in a very different way, for linking to the news that some researchers are making plans for a Ceres Polar Lander. Space.com has a good overview of this project.

As the exploration of the solar system progresses, some scientists are considering missions to often overlooked worlds. One of these is Ceres, the smallest known dwarf planet which lies within the asteroid belt.

Investigations have shown that Ceres is an excellent target for exploration and may even have astrobiological significance.

Joël Poncy is in charge of interplanetary advanced projects within the Observation and Science Directorate of Thales Alenia Space, a European company that works on satellite systems and other orbital infrastructures. This organization has been involved in many scientific missions, including the Huygens probe, CoRoT, ExoMars, Mars Express and Venus Express. Poncy and his team, in association with Olivier Grasset and Gabriel Tobie from LPG-Nantes, now have turned their eyes to Ceres.

Preliminary plans for a Ceres Polar Lander are currently being drawn up. The idea is to build a low-cost mission using reliable existing technology to complement other larger missions, while benefiting from NASA's Dawn mission results. Assuming launch by a Soyuz rocket, the spacecraft would take around four years to reach Ceres. It would then enter orbit before attempting a landing.

Poncy adds that "the lander would separate from the carrier, brake, land close to the target site while automatically avoiding boulders and permanent shadows. We would then perform an analysis similar that that of NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander of the surrounding soil and release a mini-rover to explore further. Astrobiological experiments similar to ExoMars can be envisaged."

Landing an automatic vehicle on Ceres will require some impressive technology, but this is already in development as part of other projects. Poncy said "techniques are being developed for robotic missions to the South Pole of the Moon, such as ESA's MoonNext, for which Thales Alenia Space has been awarded one of the study contracts."

A Ceres Polar Lander would provide a golden opportunity to transfer at low cost these lunar and Martian technologies for lander, rover and instruments to icy moon-like conditions, thanks to comparable orders of magnitude for gravity and temperatures at Ceres' poles.

I heartily approve of this. Quite apart from the general principle that there's never such a thing as too few space probes, long-time readers might remember my long-standing interest in Ceres, the largest dwarf planet in the inner Solar System and easily the most Earth-like of the various dwarf planets, nearly all of these being icy worlds far out in the Kuiper Belt.