Endurance Rover Sample Return Mission: Challenges and Strategies for Long-Range Lunar Exploration

This paper highlights selected challenges in long-range lunar exploration and outlines strategies to address them. The Endurance Rover sample return mission concept envisions the use of a long-range rover to explore, traverse, and collect samples from across the farside South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin along a 2000 km-long route. As the largest, deepest, and oldest impact basin on the Moon, SPA constitutes a critical window into the earliest epochs of the Solar System evolution. The Endurance rover concept is based on a 4-wheeled, RTG-powered, rover equipped with a sampling collection system. The proposed traverse planning methodology relies on available orbital imagery and observations to guide global and local path planning. Three approaches to global localization —a radiometric-, optical- and stellar-based method— are being investigated and their advantages and drawbacks highlighted. The concept of operation consists of traverses between sampling sites that are mostly driven autonomously, and sampling campaigns with considerable ground-in-the-loop involvement. The envisioned mission duration of three to four years provides significant margin for handling of faults and other unanticipated delays. Unlike prior planetary surface missions such as the Perseverance and Curiosity rovers, which rely on daily planning cycles, the Endurance traverse planning and operation processes are envisioned to be entirely on a “strategic” timeline. To enable this, significant efforts are undertaken to develop and validate the necessary onboard autonomy. The system-level capabilities needed for Endurance include flexible execution, activity and resource management, and system health management. Key capabilities needed for autonomous surface navigation, both during the lunar day and night, include perception and 3D mapping, pose estimation, hazard assessment, and motion planning.