NASA to Demonstrate Moon Rover

coondoggie writes "NASA will this week demonstrate its lunar robot rover equipped with a drill designed to find water and oxygen-rich soil on the moon. NASA said the engineering challenge of building such as drilling system was daunting because a robot rover designed for prospecting within lunar craters has to operate in continual darkness at extremely cold temperatures with little power. The moon has one-sixth the gravity of Earth, so a lightweight rover will have a difficult job resisting drilling forces and remaining stable.The project is just one demonstration of the collaboration NASA is utilizing to bring together its next moon shot. For example, Carnegie Mellon was responsible for the robot's design and testing, and the Northern Centre for Advanced Technology built the drilling system. NASA's Glenn Research Center contributed the rover's power management system. NASA's Ames Research Center built a system that navigates the rover in the dark. The Canadian Space Agency funded a Neptec camera that builds three-dimensional images of terrain using laser light, NASA said."

Comments

heh.

[apodyopsis]

so.. what are the odds of the robotic rover being hit by a very high speed mass impacting in an attempt to locate hydrogen fired from another NASA section?

I can see it now... "mission controller! we did not find any hydrogen, but we picked up large amounts of refined titanium, gold and radioactive isotopes! aliens!"

meanwhile in another room perplexed and gloomy tech monitor their screens in woe and confusion, whilst listening to the cheers next door...

drill problems

[Jodka]

quote:

...so a lightweight rover will have a difficult job resisting drilling forces and remaining stable

I assume here they are referring to either: 1) The problem of the drill staying still and the rover rotating around it. 2) Downward force on the drill lifting the rover up.

With conventional earth-bound drilling these problem are solved in the case of 1: by using multiple counter-rotating bits and in the case of 2: Auger bits, which both remove material and bite into the material at the bottom of the hole with a screw, pulling themselves downward without requiring downward pressure on the drill.

I would certainly think that counter-rotating heads would work on the moon, though use of an auger might depend on the material properties of moon rock.

Re:Aliens

[Idiomatick]

I know this is just flamebait but ... The lunar landing can be fairly easily proven irrefutably from earth. When they were up there they left behind laser reflecting arrays. What those do is you point a laser at it and it reflects the laser back directly at you. So people with a powerful laser and telescope can pick it up easily enough. As well the americans were in a space race with the russians, HAD the us faked it why would the russians not call them on it? It made them look like crap and they easily had the tech to check. Also lunar rocks if you have taken 1st yr chem are pretty irrefutable.

Re:Less gravity

[meringuoid]

I think that with the moon's lower gravity you could get away with hauling much more weight in batteries.

Look up the cost of shipping a kilo of mass to the Moon before you say that. Every kilo used up by a battery adds to the launch cost, and is a kilo not used up by a scientific instrument. And there's a hard upper limit: there are no Saturn-class launchers in the world today, so the whole payload cannot exceed the capacity of the largest Delta Heavy in the inventory.

Proof!

[Itninja]

From TA: "NASA says it wants to put people on the moon by 2020."

Gotcha! They just admitted that they have never put people on the more before. That whole 1969 bit was just a hoax.

Re:Drilling?

[mapsjanhere]

And what your you using to blast with? I'm sorry, but your leaf blower doesn't work very efficiently at 10^-12 torr. You could use something similar to the ascend rockets they used on the lunar module (that set off the dust clouds that set of the "fake, fake" cries), but the regolith is several feet deep, so you need one hell of a blast there. You're actually better off to coat large areas with a very thin layer of binder, and keep the dust down that way.

Re:sighhhhhh

[mapsjanhere]

Not enough sugar in the coffee this morning? The issues of drilling on the moon are nothing you've ever seen on earth, and none are related to the lower gravity. A few facts (I know, you don't bother with them): Your surface temperature fluctuates from -220 C to + 110 C, with 150 C difference being a good guess for most locations. There are no lubricants that will work over that range, and none that work at -220 C. You have no atmosphere to cool your drill motor, or blow the highly abrasive regolith dust off your seals and bearings. You can't drill using the standard slurry approach to move your debris out of the hole. Your nearest spare parts are 300,000 miles away, and there's no one to loosen that lug nut. You have a very limited power supply from solar cells, and any dust you allow to get on the cells you will not be able to remove. For an easy challenge, try digging a hole in the middle of the Antarctic plateau, middle of winter, with a golf cart full of supplies, and a 5 kW generator for power. Remotely controlled.