It’s the year 2028. A robot is landing on the southern pole of the lunar surface with one objective – to find resources. With poor visibility due to low lighting, this robot will need to navigate dusty, loose regolith and rocks in its search for water, one of our most valuable resources.
The unique laboratories at SnT provide the ideal simulated environments for researchers to test their work. This year, SnT added two unique laboratories to its space research facilities.
Right now, as we speak, a staggering 131 million fragments of junk are orbiting our planet, travelling at a speed of 28.100 km/h, with incredibly high momentum. In fact, space debris is an environmental catastrophe whose effects are becoming increasingly dangerous. So dangerous, in fact, that the U.S. Space Force is looking into buying debris-removal services from the private sector.
The NewSpace era is here to stay, and has been fuelled by the possibilities offered by low Earth orbit satellite constellations and the connectivity they provide – so much so, in fact, that even institutions like the EU are now launching their own satellite constellations.
As countries and companies worldwide reach advanced milestones in the new space race and prepare for future missions to the Moon, a number of technical aspects of lunar expeditions have yet to be defined. One of them, connectivity, constitutes a very pressing problem. How will future missions on the Moon communicate with each other, alongside ground stations on Earth?
Time is money – especially in space. As a host of new lunar expeditions queue up for an eventful year, once they reach our natural satellite, rovers and other spacecraft will only have a limited amount of time to operate before running out of fuel – a.k.a sunlight. Until we can viably leverage in-situ resources like ice and regolith, solar energy will still be the main power source on the Moon (and by far the easiest to harvest).