European Student Moon Orbiter

The European Student Moon Orbiter (ESMO) was a proposed European student mission to the Moon. Student teams from 19 universities throughout Europe worked on the program. ESMO was conceived by the Student Space Exploration & Technology Initiative under the support of the European Space Agency (ESA); prior to the start of Phase A the full responsibility for the management of the program was transferred to the ESA Education Office. In 2009, Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) was selected as prime contractor. ESMO was scheduled for launch in late 2013 or early 2014, but further ESA evaluation deemed the ESMO project's costs "unsustainable" given the ESA Education Office's budget.

The mission objectives for ESMO were:

The educational aim of the project was to provide valuable hands-on experience to university students within a real and demanding space project. This is in order to fully prepare a well qualified workforce for ambitious future ESA missions.

The spacecraft of approximately 190 kg mass and a size of 76 x 74 x 74 cm was designed to be launched as a secondary or auxiliary payload into Geostationary transfer orbit in late 2013 / early 2014. From there, the spacecraft would use its on-board propulsion to travel to lunar orbit via a weak stability boundary transfer. This travel via the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point would take three months, but it requires much less propellant than a direct transfer (see Low energy transfer and Interplanetary Transport Network). ESMO is intended to be operated in lunar orbit for six months.

Payloads that were considered for the orbiter included:

The table below provides an overview of the spacecraft platform and the ground segment.

21 teams from 19 European universities in ESA member states and cooperating states were part of the project.

Led by ESA's Education Office at ESTEC, the project successfully completed a Phase A feasibility study and continued with the preliminary design during phase B. So far, more than 200 students have been involved in phases A and B of the ESMO project.

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