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."

the real challenge...

is hopping over 2 troughs in rapid succession while shooting the moguls that immediately follow

Drilling?

Bring on the dynamite!

Re:

I don't know about extracting H2, and O2, but since Regolith is a pain the ass for the astronauts I'm thinking a rover could be sent to blast away a nice work area for them to arrive and have a regolith free area to set up their moonbase. I'm no rocket sc

Re:Drilling?

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:Drilling?

I don't think blast charges oxidize with the atmosphere do they? Doesn't seem like that would mix fast enough. Torpedoes don't seem to have any trouble. As for regolith, "Portable antitank weapons have become more powerful, more reliable, and more available worldwide since the early 1980s. Many of these weapons are capable of penetrating 20 to 40 inches of armor plate steel" (cite [state.nv.us]). For that matter, anything that gets all the way from the earth to the moon is going to arrive with plenty of momentum. Maybe they could just drop a DU rod out of the probe before initiating deceleration for the landing?

heh.

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...

Ah, here's the real plan!

So the truth comes out! They are planning a rover mission, but just in case their math fails to match up and the rover ends up crashing on the moon, they will just say they were searching for hydrogen [slashdot.org].

Standardize?

I hope the folks who work on the various rovers get together periodically and exchange ideas -- a standard data bus, a secure common operating system, reuse of algorithms, joint testing of components... could save time, money, and mistakes.

Re:

I hope the folks who work on the various rovers get together periodically and exchange ideas -- a standard data bus, a secure common operating system, reuse of algorithms, joint testing of components... could save time, money, and mistakes.

Must... resist..

drill problems

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.

Proof!

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.

Sigh...

The moon has one-sixth the gravity of Earth, so a lightweight rover will have a difficult job resisting drilling forces and remaining stable.

I really tire of all the sensationlism that needs to be tied to everything. Give me a break. This problem has b

Re:Sigh...

The moon has one-sixth the gravity of Earth, so a lightweight rover will have a difficult job resisting drilling forces and remaining stable.

I really tire of all the sensationlism that needs to be tied to everything. Give me a break. This problem has been solved so many times it's not even funnny.

Right - then why don't you provide some solutions that work rather than handwaving nonsense?
 
 

How many helicopters which essentially have 0 gravitational force to keep them straight do you see spinning out of control?

Helicopters provide counter revolution forces in a wide variety of way, precisely none of which will work on the rover.
 
 

I think ships anchors are a pretty old tech that's been around a while. How about firing a few pilons into the ground for anchorage.

For the first, anchors are heavy - and spare weight allowance isn't something the rover has. For the second, how do drive the pitons without encountering the very problems you are driving the pitons to resist?
 
It isn't nearly as simply as you make out.
 
 

A group of 5th graders can solve this.

Everything is easy when all you have to do is handwave. It gets rather harder when you actually have to do it.

Re:

It can all be figured out using freshman physics.

Solving it in freshman physics has very little to do with solving it with real world hardware that can built within the constraints of time, mass, volume, budget, reliability, etc...

Anchors

Re:

Absolutely...

Since helicopters use atmospheric resistance to maneuver, those tactics don't apply to the Moon, with virtually no atmosphere to use for the tail rotor to counteract tourque. Bzzzt! Wrong answer!

Firing pitons into the Moon to hold the rover do

day/night cycle

to operate in continual darkness at extremely cold temperatures with little power.

Just put it to sleep, and wait for the next sunrise.
Or am I missing something?

Re:

detach the solar panel, leave it at the top, and use a cable?
maybe too many extra complications.

Aliens

Does it run Linux?

Good question. I'm more interested in if they're going to ask observers to wear "alien" costumes while they film it. A few years from now, after the "landing" on the moon, they show their footage of the moon "landing" with the "aliens" w

Re:Aliens

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.

Moooon Roverrrr!

Wider than a mile
I'm crossing you in style someday
You dream maker, you heart breaker
Wherever you're going I'm going your way
Two drifters off to see the world
Theres such a lot of world to see
Were after the same rainbows end
Waiting round the band
My h

No, it's...

We're whalers on the moon,
We carry a harpoon.
But there ain't no whales So we tell tall tales And sing our whaling tune...

Re:

What would you do with batteries? I'd like to see the battery that would last for a year while drilling through stone.

Re:Less gravity

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.

Internal Combustion

It's hard to beat the energy & power density of internal combustion engines. Since there is no air, your propellant is heavier, since you'd need to carry the oxidizer, but I suspect that you'd still have an advantage in range. In The Case for Mars [amazon.com] Robert Zubrin has proposed internal combustion Mars rovers that could use CO2 as an oxidizer. (I forget what the fuel is, but it can be made from methane derived from local CO2 and hydrogen.) Also, in the book The Rocket Company [hobbyspace.com] an automaker funds a trip to the moon where they use a modified SUV carrying its own oxidizer.

Re:sighhhhhh

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.