CLAVIUS: AN OFF-POLAR SITE OPTION FOR THE NASA ARTEMIS BASE CAMP
KSU Prof. Pascal Lee, PhD, recommends that NASA & partners consider establishing a lunar base – the Artemis Base Camp – at Clavius Crater, at 61.20°S, 15.50°W (proposed base coords).
Logistics and safety-wise, the site is open, flat, and smooth, enjoys favorable solar illumination, unrestricted direct-to-Earth comms, reliable anytime access from/to Earth, and a trafficable route -the ‘Northwest Passage’- to/from the lunar south polar region. The base would be nuclear-powered, the only practical long-term solution given the high power demands of a base, the need to survive the lunar night, lunar dust degradation of solar panels, and the need for Moon To Mars relevance and practice.
Scientifically, Clavius is the second largest impact crater on the lunar nearside and one of its most ancient (Nectarian age). It gives access to several large younger craters within its perimeter, including the very young Rutherfurd crater (Copernican age) which generated fresh impact melt and presents many intriguing pits and caves. Clavius is south enough to also offer several permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) and is where, surprisingly, molecular H2O has been detected at the lunar surface. These facts combined suggest some Clavius PSRs and pits/caves might cold-trap H2O ice.
A remote mining operation near the lunar South Pole can eventually be set up if/once/where H2O proves to be economically viable to extract as a resource, which is far from being established at present. Given that large remaining uncertainty and it being best addressed via sustained robotic exploration with VIPER, more CLPS missions, and long-range rover missions, it is unnecessary to subject human crews to the heightened risk and highly constrained operations of going to the south polar regions at this time.
A Moon base at Clavius is what was depicted in the 1968 classic science-fiction film and book “2001: A Space Odyssey”. While most of our scientific reasons to set up a base there were not known at the time, it would be an exciting (public engaging) case of reality meeting fiction if Artemis Base Camp were established there.
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