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TThe Colorado-based start-up Lunar Outpost wants to send a group of well-equipped small rovers to inspect the moon. This week, the four – wheeled vehicle debuted before the announcement of its mission next year.
The intent of these rovers is not exploration, but economic considerations: The prospect of lunar mining is attracting growing interest in recent years for minerals that could be useful here. The study of what minerals could be on the moon has been the subject of a university research survey. There could be fuel for rocket in the moon, thinks the Japanese government. This could simply be the platform for more business ventures.
Lunar Outpost (not related to the NASA project of the same name) aims to test the lunar rover, or "prospector" as the company called, in the United States. With the rich data from these prospectors lunar outposts, which could be 20 to 25 at a time, missions focused on extraterrestrial extraction can make better decisions before launch. If all goes well on the moon, Lunar Outpost is looking to send the swarms to other rocky destinations in the future.
AJ Gemer, chief technology officer for Lunar Outpost, said reverse on the challenges of developing moon mining technology over the phone this week. The company also announced this week that it will announce more information about its first mission "mid-2019".
What inspired Lunar Outpost to build the prospector?
This move to commercial space and public-private partnerships has been discussed for many years – How do people earn money and businesses around space resources?
What is needed now is the ground check of [moon mapping] models. By getting closer, making sure that the models are accurate, that the resources exist, what are their forms, what is needed to extract them. It's something that can only be done from the surface.
How do you see the prospector integrating into the international space community?
Several agencies and countries are interested in using in situ resources, but these early missions will want to know what is a landing site – very precisely – what is available on this site and how to access it. These data are so valuable as the United States.
What resources does the rover look for?
We think that water will be a fruit at your fingertips. It can be electrolysis in liquid hydrogen and oxygen and used for rocket fuel, but it is also useful for life support, a radiation shielding material, etc. I think that water prospecting will be one of the most valuable activities in the beginning.
No matter which place in mind?
We keep the details of our initial mission silent, but in a general way, there are craters near the poles of the moon that never see the sun. They are called shaded areas permanently. It is very cold in these craters, so water ice – perhaps because of comet impacts – can migrate, condense, collect and never be evaporated by the heat of the sun.
It's an open question of how much and how deep, so it is necessary for a robotic mission to confirm. Orbital missions find ice signatures, but they can reach a few centimeters or several feet deep, which makes all the difference.
Why send several small rovers on a big one?
This goes back to the multiplication of the workforce. Previous robotic missions were a very valuable robot with a large, trained support staff that ensured its safety, which was very useful for initial planetary exploration.
But for a business enterprise that wants prospecting data, you need to cover more domains than a single mobile, so that the computer and standalone algorithms have improved, it becomes possible to create mobiles that work with each other . Our mobile platform is much less expensive than any previous mission, because each robot is not as important as the previous missions.
The rover is quite light at 10 kilograms. What is the payload of 5 kilograms for?
The payload space is very valuable, so we wanted to leave extra space in each of these rovers to be able to use other instruments. This may come from universities, other institutions or NASA's resource prospecting mission, which has been canceled.
Our standard instrumentation set is strictly for prospecting, but [missions] could add mining or other instruments.
And what is in this package?
We have a scanning mass spectrometer, an embedded drill – it can explore and examine what is happening on the surface, which is really one of the unique capabilities. We can see what's going on below the surface, we have a 360-degree LIDAR and a 4k video, and all that really good data will be sent back to Earth.
What has been your biggest challenge so far?
There have been many, many technological challenges, and of course, funding challenges are still a challenge for startups, but we are fortunate to be located in a really great region with Colorado School of Mines and the newly formed test bench at the Center for Space Resources. We are really in the right place at the right time.
Speaking of Colorado – how does the lunar test bench differ from the moon?
The lunar test bench is designed to be as representative as possible in terms of chemical composition, the soil is called a regolith simulator, its chemical composition, its grain size, its distribution are accurate, but of course the gravity of the Earth is six times larger than that of the Moon. gravity. Thermal conditions too. A lunar day is about 13 Earth days, but once the sun goes down that day, it's extremely cold, which is very difficult for robots to handle.
The best we have is a small test bench, under vacuum, with thermal conditions.
What exactly are the tests looking for?
Depending on certain areas of interest, we define a set of requirements concerning the type of slopes that it must be able to cross, from top to bottom or horizontally, the types of obstacles it will have to overcome and the duration it must to be able to ride in difficult conditions. There are also launch conditions, so think about it and design it all.
What are you excited about most?
I am very excited about putting our product on the moon and continuing to create future generations. I am interested in the possibility of not having to bring the payload, it requires a lot of fuel and imposes limits on what you can bring, because this ability will give humanity a lot more capabilities.
What are the misconceptions that people might have about lunar mining?
I would say that there are questions about policy issues related to extraterrestrial mining. The treaties on space are quite complex. In general, it specifies that any use or benefit of extraterrestrial resources must be distributed to humanity, which is functionally difficult to do.
Let's say we extract 1 teaspoon of water. How do you distribute this among humanity? But you can not have a situation where a country is planting its flag and "now we own the entire planet". There is an ongoing conversation around this to allow us and encourage us to explore because it is universally good for everyone. We want to see as many people live and work on the moon as possible in our lifetime.
This interview has been modified for brevity and clarity.
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