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Completed TRL 6 (started at 5, targeting 9)
ShadowCam is an electro-optical sensor hosted on the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO). KPLO is South Korea’s first lunar-orbiting satellite and is being developed and managed by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) as a technology demonstration and science mission. KPLO is currently scheduled to launch in August 2022 aboard a Falcon-9 from Cape Canaveral and will have a nominal 12 month polar orbiting mission duration while carrying five South Korean payloads, in addition to NASA’s ShadowCam.
ShadowCam will map surface reflectance within the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) that will provide critical information about the distribution and accessibility of volatiles, such as water ice, in PSRs at spatial scales required to both mitigate risks and maximize the results of future exploration activities. ShadowCam is a high-heritage instrument based on the successful Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) currently in the 11th year of operation. While ShadowCam’s detector will saturate while imaging illuminated ground, no harmful consequences will occur to the shadowed portion of the image.
ShadowCam utilizes an enhanced build-to-print copy of the LROC NAC optics, including a 700 mm focal length and a f/3.6 Ritchey-Chretien telescope with a composite metering structure and baffle. Flight electronics are modified to use a time delay integration (TDI) charge coupled device (CCD) photon detector to increase the effective integration time by more than 800 times that of the NAC. ShadowCam has a 17-μradian pixel scale and a swath width of 2.8 degrees. The down-track dimension of a typical image will be around 84,992 lines. From a nominal 100 km altitude, ShadowCam will provide a pixel scale of 1.7 m over a ~5 km wide swath. With the increased integration time enabled by the TDI detector, these images will have a signal-to-noise ratio greater than 100 within high priority PSRs.
The ShadowCam Science Operations Center (SOC), located at the Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe, AZ, maintains overall responsibility for planning and executing instrument commanding, data processing and archiving imagery and associated data products.
The enhanced sensitivity of ShadowCam will effectively allow NASA mission planners and scientists to “see” into the shadows near the lunar poles. ShadowCam will re-visit and observe the PSRs monthly to detect seasonal changes in surface albedo, investigate the nature of anomalous radar signatures associated with some polar craters, map lunar morphology and characterize landforms that may be indicative of permafrost-like processes and provide hazard and trafficability information within PSRs for future landed elements.
The ShadowCam SOC will be co-located with the Arizona State University School of Earth and Space Exploration Science LROC SOC, the Intuitive Machines SP Hopper SOC, Apollo Image Archive, and other projects. The SOC shall maintain archive data products in the Planetary Data System (PDS) in standard PDS4 format. The SOC shall also provide a web portal allowing the public to search and access all PDS-released ShadowCam data.
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