Rover Collects Rocks from Active Volcanoes During Moon Simulation Missions

While working out of a hotel room in Italy, astronaut Thomas Reiter orders a four-wheeled robot to retrieve rock from the surface of an active volcano on Sicily’s east coast, and he does so while role-playing as if he were in orbit. around the Moon.

The four-day simulation is part of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) preparations for a future mission to the Moon, where it plans to land a rover on the lunar surface to collect rock samples. The rover, as part of the upcoming Artemis mission, will be guided by a team on Earth, as well as astronauts on Lunar Gateway, the planned space station that will orbit the Moon.

Crawler Scouts walk around Mount Etna. (Gif: ESA)

Although not the Moon, Mount Etna’s volcanic surface serves as an analogue to the Moon’s surface. The four-wheeled and two-armed Interact rover has been modified for rugged volcanic slopes, and explores rough terrain with two other rovers, Light Cruiser Units 1 and 2, belonging to the German Aerospace Center. Additionally, a stationary moon lander provides the rover with wifi and power, an overhead drone performs surface mapping, and a centipede-like crawler called the Scout serves as a relay between the Interact rover and the lander. Scouting is provided by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

For four days, ESA astronaut Reiter ordered the rover to retrieve the rock using controls installed in hotel rooms in Sicily. The Interact rover is also guided by controllers in the rover control room, which is set up in different hotel rooms because the controllers and astronauts will be physically separated during the actual mission.

The cruiser itself is about 23 km (23 kilometers) from the hotel and at an altitude of about 8,500 feet (2,600 meters) on Mount Etna. To make the exercise more realistic, the team added a one-second delay signal to the control system to simulate the time it would take for the command to reach the lunar surface from the Lunar Gateway. As the rover picks up rock from the volcano, Reiter can sense what the rover is feeling from the remote control — an added dimension to the ESA sample collection exercise.

Astronaut Reiter ordered the rover to retrieve the rock from a nearby hotel room. (Photo: ESA)

“We’ve learned a lot about the collaboration between ground control on Earth and crews on the space station orbiting the Moon, both of which operate the rover on the surface — this ‘joint’ operation can be very efficient — much more efficiently than if the two sides did it alone,” Reiter said. in a statement.

The Interact rover completed its mission by bringing rock samples to the lunar lander. (Gif: ESA)

The system has been in development for more than a decade, starting as a joystick that astronauts can control while in orbit, according to the ESA. This four-day simulation marks the first time the Interact rover has been tested during an outdoor mock setup. At the end of four days, the rover managed to return rock samples to the lunar lander. The three inventors also worked together to create a simulated array of antennas across the lunar surface to mimic astronomical radio stations on the Moon. Interestingly, this antenna did manage to catch radio bursts from Jupiter — the result of its volcanic moon Io passing through the planet’s magnetic field.

At the end of the simulation, ESA found that the controls for the rover would likely be too heavy for astronauts on the future Lunar Gateway.

“What we soon discovered was that continuous remote surveillance was very demanding on the astronaut operator, so we added features to reduce stress — on par with assisted driving offered by modern cars,” Thomas Krueger, head of ESA’s Human Robot Interaction Lab, said. in a statement. “So for example an operator can point to a location and let the rover decide for itself how to get there safely. And the neural net has been programmed to recognize rocks of scientific value for itself.”

That sure sounds a lot easier and certainly more fitting for the futuristic Artemis era. ESA hopes to launch the rover and put the control system into action by the end of the decade.

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