America wants to turn the Moon into a robotic laboratory

The US space agency NASA is planning to turn a crater on the Moon into a science laboratory for robots.

NASA wants to use a heliostat to illuminate and heat Shackleton crater on the moon to turn it into a science laboratory for robots. Illustration: NASA

According to NASA, Shackleton Crater on the moon's south polar region could be transformed into "a warm, sunlit oasis surrounded by a freezing, dark desert."

The rover-based terraforming experiment will make the lunar crater environment more Earth-like and allow robots working inside to analyze materials brought back from excavations. The area chosen for the “laboratory” will be the size of a football field, located in a valley twice the size of Washington, D.C.

NASA has planned to insert solar-powered transformers into Shackleton Crater, which will provide essential power for robotic scientists as well as heating. In the dark, the lunar crater is about -173°C, but a series of solar reflectors, or heliostats, could illuminate and warm the space, according to experts.

"From its low angle above the horizon, the sun's rays never shine through the mountaintops into the valley, until heliostats installed on these mountaintops redirect the rays downwards to create an oasis of sunlight. This will become a major science laboratory and a producer of liquid hydrogen and oxygen, fueling the largest interplanetary voyages beyond Earth," explains Adrian Stoica of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The reflectors will be carried around Shackleton Crater by rovers, so they can be extended as needed and used to beam sunlight into the crater. A single heliostat, 40 metres in diameter, could reflect light to power a fleet of Curiosity-sized rovers 10km away to prevent them from freezing.

Such terrain-generating systems could potentially direct energy into extremely harsh environments, such as Shackleton Pit, and transform them into temperate microenvironments suitable for robots and even humans to inhabit and work in, Stoica added.

The plan has been included in NASA's Phase 2 funding proposal, which calls for $500,000 for two-year research, according to PopScience.

The next step is to design a heliostat that folds down into a cube measuring 1 meter on a side and weighing less than 100 kg. Such a structure, when spread out, would cover 3,261 meters.

According to Daily Mail