µMoon

µMoon is a student project at FH Aachen University of Applied Sciences that participates in the REXUS programme of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the Swedish Space Agency SNSA.

Every year, this programme enables several student teams from Europe to conduct an experiment with a sounding rocket at an altitude of approximately 80 kilometres in microgravity and a low residual atmosphere.

The basis for the experiment is a discovery made by the Cassini space probe in 2005 during its research mission to Saturn: Fountains emerge from the ice crust at the south pole of the moon Enceladus, throwing ice particles and water vapour into space at high speed.

The discovery of these so-called "plumes" laid the foundation for a hitherto completely new interest in the moon. For example, under the surface of the ice there is an ocean of liquid water with conditions that could favour the emergence of microbial life similar to that on Earth. The extent to which these assumptions are correct, however, also depends on whether the plumes function as assumed, which makes them an interesting subject of current and future research.

A plume model developed by TU Delft and FH Aachen states that the walls of the ice crevasses in the lunar crust form natural nozzles that accelerate the flow of the plumes to supersonic.

In order to confirm the fluid dynamics of the plumes, which has not been possible so far, 19 students from FH and RWTH are developing an experiment module that will consist, at its core, of an evaporation chamber and a convergent-divergent nozzle that will generate a supersonic flow similar to that on Enceladus.

The experiment will take optical, temperature and pressure measurements, which will be used to calculate the resulting flow. This is intended to verify and improve the Plume model.

The "REXUS 30" rocket was originally scheduled to launch with this and other experiments in March 2021. Due to developments in recent years, the launch campaign has been postponed until spring 2023. During this time, the team will have the opportunity to improve parts of the experiment module.

For more information about the project, the background and the REXUS programme, you can simply send us an email to micromoon(at)fh-aachen.de.