Space Exploration Technologies Archives

October 7, 2024October 7, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

How Accessible is Titanium On The Moon?

A lunar mining facility harvests oxygen from the resource-rich volcanic soil of the eastern Mare Serenitatis.Credit: NASA/Pat Rawlings

Mining the Moon to extract its resources is a critical step on humanity’s path into the solar system. One of the most common resources on the Moon is considered relatively valuable here on Earth – titanium. At $10,000 a ton, it is one of the more valuable metals used in various industries, such as aerospace and nanotechnology. So, could we utilize titanium from the Moon to supply Earth’s economy with more of this valuable material? That question is the focus of a paper from researchers at Uppsala University in Finland.

October 3, 2024October 3, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

What’s the Best Material for a Lunar Tower?

Artist rendition of a future lunar base. (Credit: ESA - P. Carril)

Physical infrastructure on the Moon will be critical to any long-term human presence there as both America and China gear up for a sustained human lunar presence. Increasingly, a self-deploying tower is one of the most essential parts of that physical infrastructure. These towers can hold numerous pieces of equipment, from solar panels to communications arrays, and the more weight they can hold in the lunar gravity, the more capable they become. So it’s essential to understand the best structural set-up for these towers, which is the purpose of a recent paper by researchers at North Carolina State University and NASA’s Langley Research Center.

September 30, 2024September 30, 2024 by Mark Thompson

Unloading Cargo on the Moon

LANDO prepares to move its payload to a safe spot on the simulated lunar surface. NASA/David C. Bowman

I don’t think it’s something I have ever really thought of! Robotic explorers can travel around the Solar System visiting our neighbouring planets but when they arrive, sometimes a scientific package must be deployed to the surface. Never occurred to me just how that’s achieved! With a number of landers scheduled to visit the Moon, NASA are testing a new robotic arm called the Lightweight Surface Manipulation System AutoNomy capabilities Development for Surface Operations or LANDO for short! It will lift payloads off the lander and pop them down gently on the surface of the Moon.

September 28, 2024September 28, 2024 by Mark Thompson

Space Perspective Completes a Test Flight, Sending a Balloon to 30 km

It’s great to see so many private organisations entering the space sector. Space Perspective are another and they have just completed a successful uncrewed capsule ascent to an altitude of 30km. Their Neptune-Excelsior capsule was carried by a balloon and landed in the ocean 6 hours later. It was able to maintain its cabin pressure and stability throughout the flight proving that it met the requirements for future passenger flights starting in 2025.

September 17, 2024September 17, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Could You Find What A Lunar Crater Is Made Of By Shooting It?

Americans are famously fond of their guns. So it should come as no surprise that a team of NASA scientists has devised a way to “shoot” a modified type of sensor into the soil of an otherworldly body and determine what it is made out of. That is precisely what Sang Choi and Robert Moses from NASA’s Langley Research Center did, though their bullets are miniaturized spectrometers rather than hollow metal casings.

September 17, 2024September 17, 2024 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

There Could be a Way to Fix Spacecraft at L2, Like Webb and Gaia

A map of the JWST spacecraft at its SEL2 orbital point in space. Currently there can be no servicing missions to this point, but NASA engineers are studying ways to make them happen. Courtesy NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Billions of dollars of observatory spacecraft orbit around Earth or in the same orbit as our planet. When something wears out or goes wrong, it would be good to be able to fix those missions “in situ”. So far, only the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has enjoyed regular visits for servicing. What if we could work on other telescopes “on orbit”? Such “fixit” missions to other facilities are the subject of a new NASA paper investigating optimal orbits and trajectories for making service calls on telescopes far beyond Earth.

September 16, 2024September 16, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

An Ambitious Mission to Neptune Could Study Both the Planet and Triton

Mission concepts to the outer solar system are relatively common, as planetary scientists are increasingly frustrated by our lack of knowledge of the farthest planets. Neptune, the farthest known planet, was last visited by Voyager 2 in the 1980s. Technologies have advanced a lot since that probe was launched in 1977. But to utilize that better technology, we first need to have a mission arrive in the system – and one such mission is being developed over a series of papers by ConEx Research and University College London.

September 15, 2024September 15, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Can a Greenhouse with a Robotic Arm Feed the Next Lunar Astronauts?

Continuous human habitation of the Moon is the state aim of many major space-faring nations in the coming decades. Reaching that aim requires many tasks, but one of the most fundamental is feeding those humans. Shipping food consistently from Earth will likely be prohibitively expensive shortly, so DLR, Germany’s space agency, is working on an alternative. This semi-autonomous greenhouse can be used to at least partially feed the astronauts in residence on the Moon. To support that goal, a team of researchers from DLR released a paper about EVE, a robotic arm intended to help automate the operations of the first lunar greenhouse, at the IEEE Aerospace conference in March.

September 10, 2024September 10, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

What Did We Learn From Manufacturing the ACS3 Solar Sail Mission?

We recently reported on the successful deployment of the solar sail of the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) technology demonstration mission. That huge achievement advances one of the most important technologies available to CubeSats – a different form of propulsion. But getting there wasn’t easy, and back in May, a team of engineers from NASA’s Langley Research Center who worked on ACS3 published a paper detailing the trials and tribulations they went through to prepare the mission for prime time. Let’s take a look at what they learned.

September 9, 2024September 9, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Using A Space Elevator To Get Resources Off the Queen of the Asteroid Belt

Artistic view of a possible space elevator. Credit: NASA

Here at UT, we’ve had several stories that describe the concept of a space elevator. They are designed to make it easier to get objects off Earth and into space. That, so far, has proven technically or economically infeasible, as no material is strong enough to support the structure passively, and it’s too energy-intensive to support it actively. However, it could be more viable on other worlds, such as the Moon. But what about worlds farther afield? A student team from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs looked at the use case of a space elevator on Ceres and found that it could be done with existing technology.