What do we do with the lander after ascent and transfer back to the CM? | Mission Planning Workgroup | Forum

Post edited 10:51 am – December 21, 2009 by Luke Maurits

Once our astronaut has completed the ascent from the lunar surface back to orbiting CM, what do we want to do with the lunar lander?

We can't keep it in orbit forever – eventually it will run out of fuel and be unable to engage in station keeping.  Simply letting it crash into the moon naturally runs a small but non-zero risk of wiping out a space heritage site, which would be bad.  Do we just want to do a controlled crash into an empty site immediately after transfer back to the CM?  It would be nice if we could do something more useful.

If we had a better idea of how much fuel we would have left and it turned out we could maintain a lunar obit for a while we could consider kkeeping a camera or some other instrument trained on the moon for that time.  Considering that the lander is very light and would be easy to accelerate, we may even be able to push it out of the moon's gravity well and use it as a primitive probe of some kind, but I guess it would run out of power and/or leave our communications range before it reached anything interesting.

EDIT: I guess largely the same question will apply to empty Orbital Buses if we go with the plan of having the CM use either the lander's bus or its fuel for the return to Earth.