LuSEE-Night power requirements and power generation strategy

TL;DR

LuSEE-Night aims to observe the Cosmic Dark Ages from the lunar far-side by measuring redshifted 21 cm signals, requiring innovative power management and thermal strategies to operate in extreme lunar conditions.

Contribution

This paper presents the design and simulation of power generation, storage, and management systems for LuSEE-Night, enabling continuous operation during the lunar night.

Findings

Power subsystems designed to operate in 100 K to 390 K temperature range.

Simulations confirm power system can sustain two weeks of lunar night operation.

Thermal and power management strategies ensure instrument survival in harsh lunar environment.

Abstract

The Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment at Night (LuSEE-Night) is a project designed to investigate the feasibility of observing the Cosmic Dark Ages using an instrument on the lunar far-side. LuSEE-Night will measure the redshifted 21 cm transition of neutral hydrogen over a frequency range of 0.1-50 MHz, covering the redshift range 27 < z < 1100. The LuSEE-Night instrument is a radio frequency spectrometer, consisting of four horizontal monopole antennas, arranged to give wide zenith-pointing beams with two orthogonal linear polarizations. This combination of polarization, spectral, and angular sensitivity will be necessary to separate the cosmological signal from significantly stronger foreground emissions. LuSEE-Night will observe in drift scan during lunar night while the moon shields it from radio frequency interference from both the Earth and sun, and will transmit science and telemetry data back to Earth via an orbital relay during the lunar day. LuSEE-Night will have to operate in a challenging environment: its electronics must operate under hard radiation, the instrument must be thermally isolated during the cold 100~K lunar night, and have a thermal rejection path to survive the 390~K daytime temperature, and its photovoltaic and battery systems must provide sufficient power to operate during two weeks of lunar night. Furthermore, the instrument spectrometer must be powered throughout the lunar night using only a 7~kWh battery, due to mass limitations. Here we describe the power generation, storage, and delivery subsystems of the LuSEE-Night instrument, and the simulations which were performed to design the power subsystems and ensure instrument survival and operation throughout the long lunar night. We also describe the Concept of Operations (ConOps) developed for the LuSEE-Night mission, which derives from the power management simulations.