Robot NASA can dig 10,000 kg of land in a moon day

NASA revealed, In-Situ Resource Utilization Pilot Excavator (IPEX) will support the moon to help people exploit important resources, Interesting Engineering On February 3 reported. IPEX is a versatile machine, acting like both bulldozers and dump trucks. Its main task is to exploit and transport rock layers on the moon surface. This soil layer has the potential to extract essential resources such as hydrogen, oxygen, even water.

IPEX uses a new design including hollow, light, rotating and bucket cylinders. The bucket cylinder will dig and collect rocks. They rotate in the opposite direction to help reduce the feedback, allowing the system to operate effectively in the moon’s weak gravity.

Interestingly, this robot system can dig up to 10,000 kg of land in a moon day (about 14 days of the earth), equivalent to the weight of 20 adult elephants. This is a significant increase compared to the previous tasks that only collected a few dozen kg.

The ability to exploit large amounts of land surface of the system is very important for the use of local resources (ISRU) in the future. Oxygen extracted directly from the moon soil can be used to support life, fuel production and other necessary needs for long -term presence of people in this heaven.

IPEX will apply many modern algorithms and technology to increase performance and reliability. NASA has revealed a number of important auxiliary systems such as the camera system and reducing dust to navigate and observe, the movement system to run on the moon surface with wheels, heat control system to maintain temperature. Safe operation, soil transportation system with rotating bucket pipes and arms to collect and transport moon land.

The moon exploitation robots like IPEX will dig rock soil and transport to the processing plant to extract valuable resources. IPEX is designed in the form of modules, easy to adapt and easy to modify for many different moon tasks.

NASA said that this module solution helps reduce complexity and cost while ensuring that the system can operate effectively both in the test on earth and on the moon surface.

Last March, NASA tested IPEX’s automatic driving methods in a moon simulation yard, recreating difficult lighting and terrain conditions. If everything happens as planned, IPEX can help establish a long -term presence of humans, not only on the moon but also on Mars.