Lunar Exploration: Opening a Window into the History and Evolution of the Inner Solar System

TL;DR

Lunar exploration offers critical insights into the history and evolution of the inner Solar System, with future missions aiming to enhance scientific understanding through robotic and human efforts.

Contribution

The paper reviews past lunar exploration and advocates for future missions, emphasizing the importance of new instruments, sample return, and human presence for advancing lunar science.

Findings

Lunar geological record is vital for understanding Solar System history.

Future exploration requires new scientific instruments and sample return missions.

Human operations on the Moon can significantly benefit scientific research.

Abstract

The lunar geological record contains a rich archive of the history of the inner Solar System, including information relevant to understanding the origin and evolution of the Earth-Moon system, the geological evolution of rocky planets, and our local cosmic environment. This paper provides a brief review of lunar exploration to-date, and describes how future exploration initiatives will further advance our understanding of the origin and evolution of the Moon, the Earth-Moon system, and of the Solar System more generally. It is concluded that further advances will require the placing of new scientific instruments on, and the return of additional samples from, the lunar surface. Some of these scientific objectives can be achieved robotically, for example by in situ geochemical and geophysical measurements and through carefully targeted sample return missions. However, in the longer term, we argue that lunar science would greatly benefit from renewed human operations on the surface of the Moon, such as would be facilitated by implementing the recently proposed Global Exploration Roadmap.