(via Now on Kickstarter: The First Steps Toward a Lunar Space Elevator | Popular Science)
Polaris Robot to Seek Water Ice on Lunar Pole
A first-of-its-kind solar-powered lunar rover can drill 3 feet into the lunar surface, hoisting a vertical triple solar array to capture sunlight from super low on the moon’s horizon.
Roboticists at a company called Astrobotic, a spinoff from Carnegie Mellon University, built a working prototype and plan to test it in the next few months. Astrobotic and CMU hope to nab the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon.
Polaris is designed to seek out water ice trapped in the cold craters and regolith at the moon’s poles. It has 3-D cameras and laser guidance systems for navigation, and it will communicate directly with Earth using an S-band antenna.
A lunar day lasts about two Earth weeks, and about 10 of those days would have enough sunlight for drilling at the moon’s poles. Polaris would drill up to 100 holes in those 10 days as it searches for water ice deposits. If it survives the lunar night, it could recharge again as soon as the sun comes up, and continue drilling for ice as long as its drill bit lasts.
(via Meet Polaris, The First Ice-Drilling Lunar Prospector-Bot | Popular Science)
Can Kickstarter Kickstart Development of a Space Elevator on the Moon?
At $8,000, the project from LiftPort Group wasn’t going to get us an elevator right away, even if as of writing the team has raised more than $15,000. Instead it’s funding an early, related project: sending a robot two kilometers up via a cable and building a test platform of high-altitude balloons that are tethered to the ground.
It’s not a stretch to think they’ll able to reach that goal, since they pretty much already have. LiftPort Group went out of business in 2007, but before that the team made it only a quarter of a mile shy of that distance. This is more of a team rebuilding exercise.
The robot launch is sort of the precursor to the precursor: this could help with the Lunar Elevator, which in turn could help with the Earth Elevator.
In the lunar version, a base component—a space capsule, basically—would be attached to a rocket and sent toward the Moon. When it got close enough, a cable would eject from the capsule and attach to the surface of the moon, allowing for transport between the surface and the capsule.
Since a full connection between the Earth and the Moon is still decades away, it would work as a checkpoint: A rocket could be sent to the orbiting station and people or objects could be lowered to the Moon, similar to how the robot in the test project would travel.
LiftPort has offered a list of “stretch goals,” additional projects to be completed if they raise more money. They go all the way up to $3 million, helping to fund their “feasibility study,” which they’re hoping to launch next year. After that gets done they can give a certain yes/no on whether the project is possible.
Engineer Breaks Down Obstacles and Opportunities in Mining on the Moon
Business analysts may poke fun at the “impossibly” expensive cost of mining nearby celestial bodies such as asteroids, or even the moon, but these pursuits are not beyond the realm of possibility.
Returning to the moon for the purposes of mining will require new technologies and new ways of thinking, and this extends to the conventional business model. We cannot write these pursuits off based on high cost alone, especially given the hidden treasures to be found.
