The Silfela Mission to the Aristarchus Plateau, Moon

Silfela is a low-cost lunar PRISM mission concept designed to study the regolith proper-ties of the Aristarchus Plateau on the Moon (Fig. 1). The mission will make use of the PRISM mobility capability (rover) to assess regoliths in different geo-logical units. The instrument suite consists of the SPARTA regolith sampling toolkit, the NIRVSS imager/spectrometer, the NSS neutron spectrometer [4], context cameras, and a high-resolution hand-lens imager. “Silfela” is a word from the fictional Qenya language which means “small lunar excavation.”