FIGURE 1. The RASSOR robot climbs a hill during recent testing at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
FIGURE 2. With a pair of drums positioned on the arms, the RASSOR can take on a number of different shapes to accomplish its work.
year at the Kennedy Space Center (as reported in SERVO), Embry Riddle's Prescott team demonstrated the "bucket drum" technique successfully in this student competition.
The RASSOR looks like a small tank chassis with a drum at either end, each attached with arms. The drums are perhaps the robot's most innovative feature. Because they are mounted on moving arms, they can act almost as legs letting the robot step and climb over obstacles. The team calls such moves "acrobatics." They point out that the robot can safely drive off the lander and right itself, flip itself over to get unstuck from fine soil, and lift the whole body off the ground to let its treads run smoothly to remove built-up soil. RASSOR is designed to easily make itself into a Z-shaped position to drop its soil collection into a hopper.
The robot is designed to skim lunar soil and dump it into a device that would pull water and ice out of the dirt and turn their chemicals into rocket fuel or breathing air for astronauts working on the surface. The device would be part of the lander that carries the RASSOR to the Moon's surface. So, the robot would be the feeder for a lunar resource processing plant — a level of industry never before tried anywhere besides Earth.
A concept mission for RASSOR would have a 2,000 pound payload in addition to the lander, which would be about the size of the Phoenix lander NASA sent to Mars. The RASSOR is expected to weigh about 100 pounds. The remaining payload would be used to process the lunar soil delivered by RASSOR.
Producing water and fuel from the lunar soil would save the tremendous expense of launching the supplies from Earth, since 90 percent of a rocket's mass normally consists of propellant — which could be made on the Moon.
In order to provide enough material to the production platform to create usable amounts of resources, the RASSOR would need to operate about 16 hours a day for five years. It would drive five times faster than the Mars Curiosity rover's top speed of four centimeters per second, then shave the Moon's surface with a pair of rotating drums, and return to Information provided by NASA's Steven Siceloff, Kennedy Space Center. Photos provided by NASA.