Lunar Oxygen and Water Production Tech Tested

savuporo writes "NASA and its industry partners organized a two-week lunar in-situ resource utilization field test in Hawaii. The tested machines included a few different rovers and prototype plants for generating oxygen and water from lunar regolith. Astrotoday has a picture gallery and a video report. This follows on the heels of the recent ESA lunar robotics challenge event held on Tenerife, which tasked student teams to build a lunar robot that would be able to search for water ice in lunar polar craters."

Re:in-situ resource utilization field test in Hawa

[SatanicPuppy]

Volcanic ash would be a pretty good substitute for lunar dust. Sounds fine to me, and you could chill on the beach when the work day is done.

Re:"TWEEL" seems like a bad design

[__aalxwx4918]

Nah, tweels are brilliant. you get more surface area (like a pneumatic tire if you have a stiff tweel, or more like a track with more flexible ones), but with the single point of rotation and simple mechanism of a wheel. yes, stuff gets in them, just like a regular wheel on a car, but it falls out nicely and doesn't weigh too much. expect to see more of them soon. also, scarab has regular wheels as well - they also went to hawaii. (and yes, ive seen the tweels up close, in person, on scarab)

Re:in-situ resource utilization field test in Hawa

[lmckayjo]

How do they know where the water is from? Because of previous lab tests, regolith simulant sample checks before and after processing (using the same spectrometers that flew on the Mars Exploration Rovers, among others), and hopefully because of sound engineering from the outset.

I agree that nowhere on Earth is a great analog to Lunar climate/weather, but the point is to put these prototypes into a dusty, windy environment, drive the sample-delivering rovers around, etc. For this test in Hawaii they needed to put electric blankets on some components because of hard frosts at night... they'll change that system before flying it!

The point isn't photo-ops and vendor networking, although these things happen. The point is to do real science on Earth in preparation of doing real science on the moon and Mars.

I, however, was at the test to meet people and have my photo taken with cool equipment. That's the benefit of being a slave^d^w I mean an undergrad intern (and living in Hawaii).

-L