Scarab Lunar Prospector To Be Tested In Hawaii

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Wednesday, 15 of October , 2008 at 3:02 am

If there’s one thing that’s hard to find here on Earth, it’s the moon. I guess it’s pretty tough to find a good analog for the lunar surface, ’cause NASA has decided to test out a potential lunar rover called Scarab in Hawaii, of all places. Yeah, the volcanic landscape there is kinda like the lunar surface, but the test site 9,000 feet up Mauna Kea also has snow, fog, wind, rain, and 40 degree daytime temperatures, most of which are decidedly un-moony. But you take what you can get, I suppose.

Scarab has been designed by Carnegie Mellon to drill into the lunar surface in search of useful stuff like hydrogen, oxygen, and a convenient mixture of the two called water. It’s able to navigate autonomously around the dark side of the moon, without relying on constant contact with Earth or constant power from the sun. The radioactive isotope power generator on Scarab is good for ten years (that’s ten years), the trade-off being that you can’t get the power out of the generator very fast… It’s like the energizer bunny on downers. The generator outputs 100 watts of power (i.e. a weak lightbulb’s worth), which has to keep the rover’s systems going while it’s either moving around, or drilling. Consequently, the rover just does stuff very, very slowly. But that’s cool, there’s no rush. It’s got ten years, remember?

Video after the jump.

[ Scarab ] VIA [ Eurekalert ]

Comments (3)

Category: Research

• Add this post to
• Del.icio.us -
• Digg

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>