Analyses of Blue Origin Blue Moon Lunar Landing Descent Engine Plume Effects

Powered landings onto airless bodies like the Moon generate rarefied gas dynamic environments composed of engine plume flows and surface materials including entrained dusts. These induced atmospheres can cause harmful degradations of spacecraft performance. In particular, lunar dust can cause severe operational problems for human and cargo landing systems, astronauts, and deployed scientific observatories as was observed during the Apollo program. The need to understand and quantify the effects of plume-surface interactions during powered landings onto airless bodies has motivated the development of physics-based modeling approaches at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. JPL incorporates inputs from Blue Origin and literature surveys of lunar regolith and applies computational fluid dynamics, direct simulation Monte Carlo, and Lagrangian particle-tracing simulation methodologies to model the plume exhaust flow fields generated by the Blue Moon descent engines during the final meters of landing, as well as the effects of that plume flow in eroding, entraining, and transporting lunar regolith to the descent element. The effects of dust deposition onto thermal control system radiators are of primary interest in this work, but other detrimental effects can include deposition onto landing sensors and optical systems during and after landing; damage induced by dust impact or subsequent abrasion within exposed lander cavities; and the performance degradation of solar arrays and scientific payload instruments. Plume interactions will also result in lunar dust clouds which may obscure visibility during landing, and produce damage to surfaces downstream of entrainment through mechanical erosion.