ESMO (European Student Moon Orbiter) is an ambitious mission being supported and coordinated by the European Space Agency (ESA) through their Education Satellite Programme. Unlike a ‘normal’ mission, each spacecraft subsystem is being designed, built and operated by student groups based in ESA member states. This will be the third mission within the Programme building upon the earlier SSETI Express (successfully launched in 2005) and European Student Earth Orbiter (ESEO, in development and planned for launch in late 2010).
ESMO is planned to be the first European student mission to the Moon, with a preliminary launch date of 2011/12.
The mission objectives, outlined by ESA, are as follows;
1. To launch the first lunar spacecraft to be designed, built and operated by students across ESA Member States and ESA Cooperating States.
2. To place the spacecraft in a lunar orbit.
3. To acquire images of the Moon from a stable lunar orbit and transmit them back to Earth for education outreach purposes.
4. To transfer to a science orbit, and deploy a small sub-satellite for conducting global, precision lunar gravity field mapping.
The Open University’s ESMO student team are developing a biological experiment to contribute to the scientific payload, known as BioLEx (Biological Lunar Experiment).
BioLEx, currently under development, is an instrument designed to study the effect on microbial growth rate of the space environment that the ESMO spacecraft will encounter over the course of its mission. During the transit from the Earth to the Moon ESMO will spend time in Earth orbit before traversing the radiation dense Van Allen belts to interplanetary space and then lunar orbit. These different environments each present varying scenarios regarding the spacecraft’s exposure to radiation, microgravity and temperature gradients. This offers an invaluable opportunity to study how the combination of all these factors can influence the growth patterns of a living organism.
