Luna 2076

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”

Dr. Michael Hawes, vice president and Orion program manager for Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, sees the settlement of the Moon as a proving ground for the ultimate goal of reaching Mars and conducting other deep-space explorations.

The first destination is the Moon, he said at a luncheon hosted by the Webster Business alliance Wednesday, as reported by the Houston Chronicle. “NASA talks about the space around the moon as being the proving ground.” But the ultimate goal is Mars. Said Hawes:

“That’s the horizon goal of deep space exploration. We want to get to Mars but we have to learn how to do a lot of things along the way, Just as we built capability from Mercury through Gemini to Apollo to demonstrate the a lunar landing, we have to do a lot of demonstration of a much broader sense than we did back then to get to Mars. We’re going to do that building from the moon out.”

“We may build a small station on the far side of the moon. We could do science from there. We can actually see the sun and the earth so we could still get power and communications. We’ll go out and look at asteroids. NASA has an asteroid re-direct mission that they’re looking to define that would take a robotics spacecraft to go get a large boulder off an asteroid and bring it back into orbit around the moon. Then, Orion would take the crew out to do the research on the asteroid on that mission.”

The Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle is NASA’s first spacecraft designed for deep space exploration.

Collins Aerospace and Ntention, a Norwegian startup. are developing “smart gloves” that hopefully will allow astronauts to direct the movements of drones on the Moon and Mars.The collaborators recently conducted their first field test of the gloves at the Haughton-Mars Project Research Station in Canada’s high Arctic, reports Forbes.

The smart glove, embedded with a microcontroller and sensors, allows the the drone to respond to small motions of the fingers, hands, and head.

The vision behind the research project is to equip human explorers on the Moon with machines that can explore, scout, inspect, sample and fetch, reaching lunar caves, flying over mountains, or traversing terrain too tricky for humans to navigate.The robots might be equipped with appendages to do delicate work or bulk up to take on heavy lifting. more “Researchers Test Drones Controlled by Hand Signals”

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.”