Development of a space-qualified mast system for future lunar rover missions

LUVMI-X (LUnar Volatiles Mobile Instrumentation - eXtended) is a lightweight, low-cost and innovative lunar rover that is being developed on the base of the European Commission through its Horizon 2020 program. The project is coordinated by Space Applications Services with the collaboration of the Technical University of Munich, the Open University, OHB System and Dynamic Imaging Analytics. LUVMI-X is developed on the base of LUVMI, its predecessor which was sucessfully validated up to TRL 5. Its mission is to do in-situ analysis of water, regolith and other volatiles in order to support the establishment of a lunar economy and future human missions and to explore the (PSR) Permanently Shadowed Regions located in the south pole of the Moon. To achieve this goals there are several instruments on the rover like: a volatiles sampler, a volatiles analyzer, a camera system composed by a NavCam, a Stereobench, a SurfCam, a LIBS and an illumination system. Furthermore LUVMI-X will be used as a commercial service that provide payloads slots to institutional customers. In the following dissertation I am going to explain all the details of my work which consisted in the development of a space rated mast system for the mentioned rover. The mast is composed by a pan and tilt unit which is the element allows to direct the cameras overlying, the active tracking of the antenna, for the pointing of the antenna between the rover and Earth and a one-time deployment mechanism which allows the mast to move from a 0 °stored con guration to a 90 °deployed one.