The Moon is dotted with steep-walled holes known as pits, or skylights, which likely lead to sub-surface lava tubes that could serve as sheltered underground environments for human settlers. Engineers are developing specialized robots to explore these hard-to-access topographical features.

The trick is designing these vehicles to be compatible with small landers, making them capable of negotiating steep pit aprons, and equipping them to acquire cross-pit images. A team led by William “Red” Whittaker, a robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed the PitRanger, a 33-pound mini-robot outfitted with a solar panel and an adjustable telephoto camera and tested it in a massive sinkhole in Utah.

Whittaker explains his challenge to Space.com:

“The scenario is to rove to a pit with a micro-rover, peer into the pit, acquire images of walls, floors, caverns, and then generate pit models,” Autonomy for fast exploration is the critical technology since the small, solar-powered rovers won’t be able to carry direct-to-Earth radio for supervision or guidance.

In addition, “the rover must succeed in a single illumination period” on the moon, because it needs the sun for energy and heating. (A lunar day lasts about 14 Earth days, and the lunar night is equally long.) “It only has 12 days, not 12 years, to complete its mission.”

The rover would circumnavigate the rim, identify the overlooks offering the required, and deploy a tiltable camera to obtain the required angles needed to create a high-fidelity, 3D-quality image, The result will be far superior to anything that a Moon-circling satellite could capture.

Not only do pits provide potential habitats, they are windows into lunar geology. Scientists expect to gain insights into volcanology, morphology and much more, Wittaker said.

Harkening back to the success of cubesats, small, standardized satellites, NASA will launch a small rover. Iris, that it hopes will also be inexpensive to produce.

NASA, Astrobotic, and Carnegie Mellon University are teaming up in the CubeRover project, which targets a 2021 launch date in a private delivery run paralleling the agency’s Artemis program to return to the Moon by 2024.

Iris is about the size of a shoebox, reports Space.com, and weighs less than 5 lbs. (2.3 kilograms). It travels on four wheels.

If all goes well, the rover will drive about 160 feet (49 meters), approximately the width of a football field, a journey that should tell engineers more about how best to travel over the moon’s dusty surface. The drive will take the rover far enough away from its landing site to study how the landing itself alters the surface of the moon.

Iris will support other science and technology payloads on the surface with power, portability and communications.

While Earth-based entrepreneurs work on developing reusable launch vehicles to reduce the cost of boosting people and material into space, NASA researchers are working on what a Tech Crunch.describes as robotic “pallet lander” concept to make lunar landings as reliable and cheap as possible,.

“This lander was designed with simplicity in mind to deliver a 300 kilogram rover to a lunar pole,” said Logan Kennedy, the project’s lead systems engineer in a NASA press release. “We used single string systems, minimal mechanisms and existing technology to reduce complexity, though advancements in precision landing were planned to avoid hazards and to benefit rover operations. We keep the rover alive through transit and landing so it can go do its job.”

“While most subsystems use off-the-shelf parts, one emerging technology needed for a lander like this would be Terrain Relative Navigation used for precision landing,” said Kennedy. “Testing is under way!” more “NASA Noodles Concept of Robotic Pallet Lander”

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.”

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”