Exploration – Page 2

Spacebit Touts Legged Rovers for Moon Exploration

November 4, 2019

Spacebit has announced plans to launch the United Kingdom’s first privately build Moon rover in 2021.

The company has designed robots with legs capable of delving into cracks and crevices inaccessible to flying rovers. The mission design, reports Space.com, calls for a rover to bring as many as eight robots to a drop-off point. Guided by artificial intelligence, the robots leave the “mother ship” in a swarm and explore the environs, including lunar caves.

“We don’t have wheels. We have four legs instead of the wheels, which is a very neat design,” said Spacebit CEO Pavlo Tanasyuk at the International Aeronautical Congress in October.

Costing an estimated $3 million each, the rovers are expected to take six to 12 months to build. “We could have multiple rovers exploring the moon and [its] lava tubes, and even going beyond in the future,” Tanasyuk said.

By using standardized equipment and off-the-shelf components, space exploration will become more affordable, which will stimulate more lunar exploration. “After 50 years’ absence of humans on the moon,” Tanasyuk said, “I believe that robotic missions will play a very major role in our comeback.”

VIPER Robot to Locate Water Resources on Moon

November 1, 2019

Water is believed to reside in the permanent shadow of Shackleton Crater.

NASA has announced its intention to send a mobile robot, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) to the Moon’s southern pole to identify the location and concentration of water ice in the region.

“The key to living on the Moon is water — the same as here on Earth,” said Daniel Andrews, project manager of the VIPER mission, reports Forbes. “Since the confirmation of lunar water-ice ten years ago, the question now is if the Moon could really contain the amount of resources we need to live off-world.”

Moon water also would make Mars missions more affordable, Mars enthusiasts contend.“Creating space fuel depots would allow spacecraft to travel much farther and allow missions and satellites to sustain operations,” says Karen Panetta, IEEE Fellow, Dean for Graduate Education, Tufts University. “Rather than transporting water into space in heavy loads on rockets, the goal is to extract it (mine it) from the moon and asteroids.” more “VIPER Robot to Locate Water Resources on Moon”

Moon Express Teams with Rocket Lab in X Prize Competition

December 8, 2015

Moon Express, a Cape Canaveral, Fla.-based company promoting lunar colonization, has found a rocket to get its lander to the lunar surface, reports The Verge. The company views the Moon as an untapped source of minerals to mine and real estate to settle.

A participant in the Google Lunar X Prize, a competition that will reward the first company to land a privately funded rover on the Moon, Moon Express will launch its MX-1E micro-lander on top of the experimental Electron rocket. The Electron is manufactured by Los Angeles-based Rocket Lab.

The launch contract was accepted by the X Prize Foundation. The expected launch date was sometime in 2017.

“At X Prize, we believe that the spirit of competition brings about breakthroughs that once seemed unimaginable or impossible, and so it thrills us to now have two Google Lunar X Prize teams with verified launch contracts attempting missions to the moon in 2017,” Chanda Gonzales, senior director of the Google Lunar X Prize, said in a statement. “The new space race is truly on!”

more “Moon Express Teams with Rocket Lab in X Prize Competition”

CubeSats to Probe for Water on Moon

October 8, 2015

CubeSats measure about four inches on each side — an oversized Rubik’s Cube. Photo source: NASA

The SpaceTrex lab at Arizona State University is partnering with NASA to create a tiny satellite, called the CubeSat, designed to measure and locate water on the Moon in the Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper or “Luna-H Map” project.

The competition is intense to be included on mission payloads. CubeSats are small enough, writes Popular Science, that they can hitch rides on rockets with larger payloads and get released on their own trajectories to conduct their own science. The first official launch of NASA’s Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft, scheduled for 2018, will carry 11 separate CubeSat missions into deep space, including one that will measure the effects of space radiation on yeast. The spacecraft will drop off LunaH-Map potentially along with two other lunar CubeSats to settle the question of how much water there is on the Moon and where it is.

The question for lunar water has strategic significance that the other scientific endeavors, as interesting as they may be, do not have. As Popular Science notes, lunar water will fuel exploration deeper into the solar system.

Jekan Thanga, the head engineer on LunaH-Map, dreams of a lunar gas station for astronauts. “Just think, we could have a refueling station at the L2 point,” he says, referring to a point beyond the Moon where gravitation alignments would allow supplies in space to remain stationary. “Our astronauts could stop there to refuel and stock up on supplies before heading out to Mars, or Europa.”

Since 2000 more than 300 CubeSat missions have been deployed in Earth Orbit, including the Planetary Society’s LightSail this year.

Luna 25 Probe to Restart Russian Ambitions on the Moon

September 3, 2015

Model of the Luna 25 probe. Photo credit: Gazet.ru.

Russia is pinning its hopes for lunar colonization on Luna 25, a probe set for launch in 2025 — making it the first Russian craft to land on the Moon since 1976. Luna 25 will pave the way for an even bigger coal, a crewed landing and lunar base, reports Spaceflight Insider.

The probe, also known as the Luna-Glob lander, will land in the Boguslavsky crater near the lunar south pole and analyze the region’s regoloth. Its four television cameras will take footage of the area. Another two cameras will observe the work of the probe’s digging tool. A radioisotope thermoelectric device will provide power by converting the heat generated by the decay of plutonium-238 isotope into electricity.

“This mission is a scientific-technological one. We want to carry out scientific experiments there, but this is a technological mission in the sense that we need to return to the Moon, learn how to land, and survive the lunar night, since a lot of what was achieved in the 1970s has been forgotten,” said Vladislav Tretyako, a researcher in nuclear planetology at the Russian Space Research institute. more “Luna 25 Probe to Restart Russian Ambitions on the Moon”

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Category: Exploration

Spacebit Touts Legged Rovers for Moon Exploration

VIPER Robot to Locate Water Resources on Moon

Moon Express Teams with Rocket Lab in X Prize Competition

CubeSats to Probe for Water on Moon

Luna 25 Probe to Restart Russian Ambitions on the Moon