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."
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 scientist though.
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.
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?
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...
Worst of all - the rover just discovered what appears to be an artifact left by aliens seconds before rover, artifact and surroundings are are vaporized by high speed impactor.
That, for some odd reason, shares the same mission name with the now dead rover.
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].
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.
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... making... lame microsoft joke...
Believe me, the Microsoft OSes weren't on my short list. I was just envisioning having a couple of RTOS and OS choices with common goals, a well-administered stable version for each, with drivers and the like controlled pretty strictly.
Oh, yes! Zoe, the autonomous rover from NASA Ames Research Center. That's encouraging to know that work was the base for new rover code. Exactly what I'd hoped.
...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.
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. How many helicopters which essentially have 0 gravitational force to keep them straight do you see spinning out of control? And that's a complex solution. I think ships anchors are a pretty old tech that's bee
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.
Indeed, helicopters provide counter revolution in many ways. All of which don't rely on an atmosphere to work. In the end its all just angular velocity you need to counter, and you certainly could do it on a rover. The point of bringing up a helicopter is simply that if its been solved for an extremely complex system like that, then the moon in comparison is pretty simplistic. It can all be figured out using freshman physics.
Anchors are only heavy because they need to travel 'far' in a decent amount of tim
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 are only heavy because they need to travel 'far' in a decent amount of time. The weight isn't there to help stop the boat, it's there to get to the bottom before you drift away from where you want to be.
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 down for drilling makes sense except for two points:
- Drilling operations will be limited by how many pitons you carry, and how the firing mechanism works. This also adds weight and defeats the 'lightweight' requirement.
The point was simply that the article makes this sound like it's some monumental feat to overcome. It simply isn't. It's been solved many times in many different scenarios. A reduced gravity does not affect the physics of negating angular velocity. Sorry, i'm long past the point where the potential to grow a crystal in space excites me. And this isn't exactly the kind of problem that makes me marvel either.
Getting there is a marvel, landing is a marvel. I'll even give them the fact that they can drive this
Well, then, damn! I oughta get a bunch of guys together and wrangle up a rover of our own. The frame and propulsion doesn't worry me. Guts out of any cheap digital camera, with a USB bus for everything, and just a hardened RS6000 would do. I know a guy who could mod an OS for us. He'll learn all the lessons from the Mars rover project, let me tell you.
Now all we need is a 65,000 liter Coke bottle.
Seriously, we aren't that far from DIY exploration, are we? The hardest part seems the radio back to Earth.
Here ya go: http://www.hssensorsystems.com/hsc/proddesc_display/0,10401,CLI1_DIV25_ETI5338_PRD736,00.html [hssensorsystems.com]
This is actually for the shuttle, the ISS uses the Russian shitter. We do however make the EMU, water processor which is used on the what goes into the toilet, ogygen generator which takes said water and produces oxygen and other environmental systems. The water is actually drinkable, but for the most part the still drink what's brought up to them.
at ~$250k a rad6000 flight board it's still a bit hard
It seems to be a NASA ritual to get ordered to do one thing & focus on the crust instead. So they're putting all this effort into hypothetical lunar science experiments & drawing pictures of manned habitats while ignoring the minor expensive detail of the rocket to get there. Haven't seen any progress on Ares V for years since they got ordered to put a number of basic science missions back on the budget.
I'll grant that it's very dark on the dark side of the moon, but without the convection an atmosphere provides, how cold will it actually be? The only heat loss will be through radiation and what (I imagine little) conduction there is between the rover and the ground. If a vacuum keeps my coffee in my thermos hot, how will it be any different on the moon?
IANARS, but I would think a bigger problem would be keeping the thing from overheating.
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" who happened to be there and tell Congress that they need more money to investigate these "aliens". After all, NASA has learned their lesson from the first fake...I mean the first landing.
Dude, give it up. That was the worst attempt at trolling I've ever seen. If you want aliens you need to go to my journal [slashdot.org]. Well actually that one's not a good example, the alien is only mentioned in passing. It's more about alcohol and drugs and violence and attempted murder and what's worse, shooting pool. The entry from last year titled Alien Invader [slashdot.org] would be more to your liking.
I called the cops on the alien. The stupid alien almost got hauled off to jail.
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.
The lunar landing being faked is as outrageous as all of us are really inhabited by alien life forces or that all of us are decedents from just two people.
I don't know how things worked in your family but I descended from two people (who each descended from two people, who each descended from two people...).
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 huckleberry friend, Moon Rover
And me
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.
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.
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.
I agree. Isn't there an easier solution? I was thinking that you could set off small explosions in the regolith and observe the spectrum emitted to determine the elements present. No need for wheels, drills, or landing systems. Just a few hundred high explosive projectiles, a telescope with a spectrometer on an orbiter and three hundred grad students back on earth to crunch the data.
Well... Those NASA people are pretty smart. I'm sure there's a reason they're going this route.
the real challenge... (Score:3, Funny)
Drilling? (Score:2)
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Re:Drilling? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Drilling? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
heh. (Score:5, Funny)
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...
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That, for some odd reason, shares the same mission name with the now dead rover.
Ah, here's the real plan! (Score:2, Funny)
Standardize? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Must... resist... making... lame microsoft joke...
AAAGH! THE AGONY!
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Believe me, the Microsoft OSes weren't on my short list. I was just envisioning having a couple of RTOS and OS choices with common goals, a well-administered stable version for each, with drivers and the like controlled pretty strictly.
Re: (Score:2)
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drill problems (Score:5, Informative)
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: (Score:2)
with respect to 2) Downward force on the drill lifting the rover up:
Control of the drill feed rate and pressure would also take care of that; If the rover is lifting, reduce force and feedrate of the drill.
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Proof! (Score:5, Funny)
Gotcha! They just admitted that they have never put people on the more before. That whole 1969 bit was just a hoax.
Sigh... (Score:2, Insightful)
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. How many helicopters which essentially have 0 gravitational force to keep them straight do you see spinning out of control? And that's a complex solution. I think ships anchors are a pretty old tech that's bee
Re:Sigh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Right - then why don't you provide some solutions that work rather than handwaving nonsense?
Helicopters provide counter revolution forces in a wide variety of way, precisely none of which will work on the rover.
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.
Everything is easy when all you have to do is handwave. It gets rather harder when you actually have to do it.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed, helicopters provide counter revolution in many ways. All of which don't rely on an atmosphere to work. In the end its all just angular velocity you need to counter, and you certainly could do it on a rover. The point of bringing up a helicopter is simply that if its been solved for an extremely complex system like that, then the moon in comparison is pretty simplistic. It can all be figured out using freshman physics.
Anchors are only heavy because they need to travel 'far' in a decent amount of tim
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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...
ROTFLMAO. You actually believe this?
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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 down for drilling makes sense except for two points:
- Drilling operations will be limited by how many pitons you carry, and how the firing mechanism works. This also adds weight and defeats the 'lightweight' requirement.
- the mechanism to fire a piton, hold
Re: (Score:2)
The point was simply that the article makes this sound like it's some monumental feat to overcome. It simply isn't. It's been solved many times in many different scenarios. A reduced gravity does not affect the physics of negating angular velocity. Sorry, i'm long past the point where the potential to grow a crystal in space excites me. And this isn't exactly the kind of problem that makes me marvel either.
Getting there is a marvel, landing is a marvel. I'll even give them the fact that they can drive this
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The frame and propulsion doesn't worry me. Guts out of any cheap digital camera, with a USB bus for everything, and just a hardened RS6000 would do. I know a guy who could mod an OS for us. He'll learn all the lessons from the Mars rover project, let me tell you.
Now all we need is a 65,000 liter Coke bottle.
Seriously, we aren't that far from DIY exploration, are we? The hardest part seems the radio back to Earth.
Re: (Score:2)
Here ya go: http://www.hssensorsystems.com/hsc/proddesc_display/0,10401,CLI1_DIV25_ETI5338_PRD736,00.html [hssensorsystems.com] This is actually for the shuttle, the ISS uses the Russian shitter. We do however make the EMU, water processor which is used on the what goes into the toilet, ogygen generator which takes said water and produces oxygen and other environmental systems. The water is actually drinkable, but for the most part the still drink what's brought up to them.
at ~$250k a rad6000 flight board it's still a bit hard
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Or indeed When are we there [whenarewethere.com]
day/night cycle (Score:2)
Or am I missing something?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
maybe too many extra complications.
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I once saw the craters on an old telescope of a friend, and they looked pretty small.
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I'm telling you: I saw them! They were about this (/makes a round shape with fingers/) big.
Focusing on the crust instead of the meat (Score:2)
"There's coffee in that moon!" (Score:2)
Crashing is easy, landing is hard (Score:2)
"NASA Plans to Smash Spacecraft into the Moon"
"NASA to Demonstrate Moon Rover"
You know guys, smashing things is not the best way to demonstrate them.
Moon Rover... (Score:2)
The hot stays hot (Score:2, Interesting)
IANARS, but I would think a bigger problem would be keeping the thing from overheating.
Finally we strike back at those terrrists (Score:2)
For the humor-impaired: Mooninites [wikipedia.org]. josh42042, props for the Mr. Show ref.
Aliens (Score:3, Funny)
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" who happened to be there and tell Congress that they need more money to investigate these "aliens". After all, NASA has learned their lesson from the first fake...I mean the first landing.
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I called the cops on the alien. The stupid alien almost got hauled off to jail.
-mcgrew
(PS- downmodding myself here, no karma bonu
Re:Aliens (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Were you asleep in sex-ed class? (Score:2)
I don't know how things worked in your family but I descended from two people (who each descended from two people, who each descended from two people...).
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Moooon Roverrrr! (Score:3, Funny)
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 huckleberry friend, Moon Rover
And me
No, it's... (Score:2, Funny)
We carry a harpoon.
But there ain't no whales So we tell tall tales And sing our whaling tune...
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Less gravity (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Internal Combustion (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:sighhhhhh (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I was thinking that you could set off small explosions in the regolith and observe the spectrum emitted to determine the elements present. No need for wheels, drills, or landing systems. Just a few hundred high explosive projectiles, a telescope with a spectrometer on an orbiter and three hundred grad students back on earth to crunch the data.
Well... Those NASA people are pretty smart. I'm sure there's a reason they're going this route.