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Small Robots Could Build Landing Site For Moon Base
A new NASA-sponsored study suggests that small lawnmower-sized robots could be used to build a landing site for a moon outpost. In order to be efficient a landing pad would have to be close to any structures created, but without an atmosphere to slow down the lunar sand it would sandblast the outpost, creating the need for some sort of protection. By using small robots to either build protective berms or collect rocks to "pave" a landing pad, NASA hopes to provide protection against the sand-blasting effects of a landing on the moon.
Now I know how I'm gonna win that sand castle contest this year...
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
If robots could be used in construction this complex, they already would. Right up here in Minnesota, there is a huge need for road repair and construction. If there was any way to automate the process more than it already is, it would be done by now. Any robot that could withstand the punishment of construction work would need to be very heavy, and also have a lot of redundancy built into it. It's one thing to make a little mini-rover with a camera and some sampling equipment. It's quite another to put a Caterpillar, cement truck, and support equipment up there, and expect it not to break. Sorry, but human beings need to be there... There are some things robots just can't do -- like repair themselves automatically. And I mean that in practical real-world terms, not in the laboratory.
Build it on Earth first and make it work, then we'll talk about the moon.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Why not use a crater wall? Put the landing strip on the outside, the base on the inside, and cut a tunnel? (And build a ramp over/around for the big stuff.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Just don't let the Chinese know where your moon base is going to be, they'll crash into it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7917957.stm
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
It's all well and good until a some half iPod, half egg timer robot swoops in and steals all the plants out of your greenhouse.
-=Bang Bang=-
No weather on the moon. No thieves. No vandals. No vegetation. No mud. 1/6th gee. No wind to blow piles of dirt away. It's a simpler environment to work in.
Forget the construction work, could you build a rover that would last 90 days in Minnesota. just driving around photographing things?
Sheesh. How about a standard unit of measurement here, like Volkswagen Beetles or African male elephants or telephone directories? Tell me they at least expressed their hard drive size in multiples of Libraries of Congress.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
On just what the lunar soil is really like. We know a few bits from the various moon missions but its not like anyone tries to dig anything around up there. If the lunar soil was just a big pile of dust, then a robot pushing it around is rather doable. But if it had all sorts surprises in it, rocks, differences in composition that changes the way one digs, well then, the robots will run into problems.
This is my sig.
If there was any way to automate the process more than it already is, it would be done by now.
Do you have any concept of which you are speaking? Why on earth (lol) would you want to further automate road construction in Minnesota? Human labor on this planet is pretty cheap, even if it is unionized. When you have fly that labor to off word, hiring someone to scrub the great wall of china with a toothbrush is cheap in comparison.
Robots don't need air, food, or water. They can work for long periods of time in utterly hostile environments with little to no supervision. They don't get sick or bored. They can be mass produced. When you are done with them, they don't want to go home. And, they have yet to rise up and try to enslave humanity, which is more than we can say for humanity.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I think constructing berms and such is redundant. After a few typical NASA landing attempts, there should be a nice crater at the landing site with berms to protect the base.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
OMFG! Those were REAL? I thought those were just fiction!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
I, for one, live in terror at the idea that machines built for shoving sand around in 1/6th gravity might someday rise up to destroy me. When the last of the brain-apes is buried knee deep in a sad little grit pile, truly they shall rue the day they created the earthmover robot.
Mouser Mecha-Catbot might have a shot at beating BioHazard.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Why doesn't NASA simply use a reverse graviton flux to land the spacecraft without any rocket blowing towards the lunar sand ? Oh wait... you guys haven't discovered yet how to create gravitons right ? Shit. I hope I haven't modified this timeline too much by revealing things you aren't supposed to know. Shitshitshit.
Many small vs. one large makes good sense in case of failure(s). Either way, why not blast the dust away as the preparation stage? A squadron of small crawlers with a high gas expansion motor (for simplicity, monopropellant such as UDMH, as in Shuttle steering thrusters or H2O2 as in Armadillo's landers) pointed ahead and slightly down. They'd line up side by side, crawl away from the base site, blasting the dust away in front of them like a line of snow blowers.
Yes, this design might require more mass to be sent to the moon initially due to the mass of reaction gas. However it leaves a bunch of functional crawlers for other tasks plus a bunch of functional motors that can be used to construct suborbital lifters.
If there's water ice, they could be constructed to harvest it, use the solar UV to convert it to H2O2, and be self-refilling. This would be slower because where there's ice there's less sunlight. Armadillo's designs would be very likely to be adaptable because they've built not only H2O2 lifter motors, but also H2O2 production facilities. A digger/UV/vacuum design is very different from their fuel production design (quite likely far more reliable), but they have some experience with the subject, and already have award money for designing landers.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
We attempted to assasinate Murphy, but it all went horribly wrong.
yeah - then the nanobots go all wrong and reduce the moon to a lifeless planet of grey rock and dust. what will you do then?
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Why robots? Because they can work at -40 temperatures, doing 16 hour shifts.
Except they can't, because apart from the fact that you're lucky to get 8 hours of sunshine in MN when it's -40 out, things like rain and snow and vandals and wind and mud and thieves that make your average human grumble in the pub after work bollix up robots completely.
Every mile of road we build takes a team of twenty people working at least a couple days.
You're building roads damn fast in MN.
The robots we're talking about only have to build 160 feet of dirt-pile. They don't even have to compact it. And they can take six months to do the job. And, again, they don't have to worry about wind and rain and green things with teeth and Mrs Cake.
I'll go. Tomorrow. Somebody get me a shovel and a suit.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
The soil shield would be for protection from micrometeorites and also keep the area inside in constant shade, reducing thermal effects that may be caused while transitioning from sun to shade. a properly shielded and pressurized habitat could then be constructed within. The habitat could use a magnetic field generator in combination with other shielding materials to protect the "Lunarians".
-=Bang Bang=-
Amazing. Absolutely amazing.
Why do you provide those quotes to refute my post? In what way am I in opposition to them? They were written long before there were robots. Your tone is starry-eyed, shallow-thinking, and reliant purely on emotional impulse, precisely the sorts of traits that explorers tend not to possess.
Unlike you, apparently, I actually want space exploration to occur, not just talk about it or daydream about my favorite sci-fi stories and cartoons.
Some of the Stanford AI crowd in the 1980s were talking up a proposal for a long-term project to build robots capable of building a moon base by the year 2000. I commented at the time "How soon can you do it in Arizona?" This yielded some embarrassment.
NASA robotics efforts have had an overall negative effect on robotics as a field. They take forever, they produce one-off devices, and they suck smart people out of useful areas. JPL's rovers are really rather simple-minded devices, and are mostly teleoperated. They're just well engineered. Robotics efforts out of the NASA "centers" have generally been embarrassing.
Come now. Nobody seriously things we should send bricks to the moon. Initially we'll send any structures we need, but any reasonable moon industrialization or colonization will require using local materials. But the first step in using local materials on a large scale will certainly involve moving a great deal of mass, probably far more mass than we'd need to significantly increase our initial capacity there.
That's the point: you need to spend mass to save mass. Sending giant solar furnaces to the Moon would be a huge investment that would almost certainly not pay off on the scale we could contemplate in the immediate future, because we don't have enough investment in the other things we'd need to exploit that. Debris berm building robots sounds about right.
An interesting thought occurs though. One solution to the mass problem is simply patience. Since the Von Neumann approach is based on exploiting exponential growth, but growth doesn't have to be fast at the outset. Suppose you put ten robots on the moon that could scavenge enough material to make one robot in ten years. After the first ten years, you'd have 11 robots. After a hundred years, you'd have about 25 robots. After a 1000 years, you'd have almost 14,000 robots. After 2000 years, you'd have 190 million robots.
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