Lunar Outpost | 2018 Nov 13
Lunar Outpost, a space technology startup developing enabling technologies for a sustained presence on the Lunar surface, announced their Lunar Prospector designed to search for and map the Moon’s natural resources. The first Prospector was demonstrated driving and drilling in Lunar regolith simulant at the Colorado School of Mines’ new Lunar testbed facility in the Earth Mechanics Institute overseen by the Center for Space Resources. This event marks the first commercial Lunar Prospector publicly tested in the United States.Click to play embedded YouTube video.
Evidence of valuable resources on the Lunar surface, such as water, precious metals, and helium-3 have been established by remote sensing on flyby missions around the Moon. This scientific data has been used to create general resource models of the Lunar surface, which now require ground-truthing to establish optimal landing sites and plan future resource extraction operations. Groups of Lunar Outpost Prospectors will map the surface and subsurface resources of the Moon, while autonomously navigating along waypoints and avoiding hazards such as large rocks and craters. These Prospectors can also be teleoperated if needed and can utilize NASA’s Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway concept as a center of operations.
The Lunar Outpost Prospectors are focused on providing exploration data for In-Situ Resource Utilization, or ISRU. Much like the Earth-bound explorers of the past, future space missions will not be able to bring all of their necessary supplies with them on their voyage. Rather, they will need to learn to use the resources already available to them at their celestial destinations. The Lunar Outpost Prospectors provide early ISRU resource location, form, and distribution data to these future missions, enabling them to plan their missions more effectively and efficiently. ...