Predicting the Outcome of the LUMIO Lunar Cubesat

The Lunar Meteoroid Impacts Observer (LUMIO) is a CubeSat mission to observe, quantify, and characterise the meteoroid impacts by detecting their flashes on the lunar far-side. This complements the knowledge gathered by Earth-based observations of the lunar nearside, thus synthesising a global information on the lunar meteoroid environment. In this work, we present the methodology developed to predict LUMIO's scientific contribution to refine the current meteoroid flux models in the solar system. Our approach relies on a combined modelling and simulation of LUMIO's Payload, Orbit, and Environment (POE). The LUMIO-POE tool has been developed in order to conduct preliminary parametric analyses, which feed back the design of both the payload and the mission operative orbit. Our results indicate that the present-day LUMIO mission has the potential to detect up to 31 impacts per day due to sporadic events in the range of impact kinetic energy at Earth [10^-6, 10^-1] kton TNT. Considering the same kinetic energy range, LUMIO has the potential to detect up to 133 impacts per day belonging to meteoroid showers during the peak of the Geminids. That neglecting stray light noise. Peaks of daily data rate greater than 1000 Mbit/deg are reached during the activity period of the Geminids. At the end of the operative phase, more than 25 Gbit of scientific data are expected to be produced.