Spinning Landers for Solar System Exploration: An Update

Harold Rosen, the decades-long technical leader of Hughes Space & Communications and pioneer of spinning satellite technology, has applied core architectural features of "dual-spin" satellites pioneered by him and his Hughes team in the 1960s to enable a novel spinning lander concept—a new spacecraft system architecture first presented to the solar-system exploration technical community at the 9th Low Cost Planetary Missions (LCPM) Conference in summer 2011. Properly scaled, his novel architecture can be applied to landing missions on virtually any hard body in the solar system, including Earth or even large human-made objects in space. This ASCE paper updates the earlier LCPM paper, providing further insight into how the mass-efficient, cost-effective spinning lander system designs can, for relatively low total mission costs, address mission objectives for planetary exploration, resource utilization and commercialization at various solar system destinations. Four separate U.S.-based mission study teams are currently assessing the applicability of this concept to various exploration, technology-demonstration and commercial program objectives, leading perhaps to one or more proposals in 2012 for mission-development funding.