Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Digging for Dollars on the Moon: The Lunar Regolith Challenge

Episode Date: June 4, 2007

Special coverage of NASA's Lunar Regolith Challenge, with robot excavators after a $250,000 prize.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thank you. to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. Today we'll take you to the Lunar Regolith Challenge on the central coast of California. That's where four amateur teams put their ingenious excavation robots to work, each hoping to win a quarter of a million dollars. We're preempting Q&A

for this special coverage. Emily Lakdawalla will return with a new installment next week. But you'll still get your night sky fix from Bruce Betts as we look at what's up and give away another Planetary Radio t-shirt. We've got just enough time for a few space headlines. STS-117 is go for liftoff on Friday, June 8.

Shuttle Atlantis is on the pad, ready for another visit to the International Space Station. It's possible that shuttle workers at the Kennedy Space Center will go on strike just days after the planned launch. By the time you hear this, NASA's Messenger spacecraft may have made a swing past Venus. Scientists are looking to coordinate collection of data with Europe's Venus Express orbiter before Messenger continues its long inward journey to Mercury. Got an insatiable craving for more space news? Me too. You'll find it on the web at planetary.org.

May 12, 2007. The day started early at the Santa Maria Fairgrounds, about three and a half hours north of Los Angeles by freeway. All was quiet when I arrived, though a few people were making last-minute preparations for the latest of NASA's centennial challenges. This one would award $250,000 to the builders of a robot that could dig up 150 kilograms of simulated moon dirt, or regolith.

But it would have to do the job without any human guidance in a half hour or less, and it could only use methods that would actually work on the moon. Joining me in the morning stillness was Ken Davidian, the Centennial Challenge Program Manager. As we spoke, we realized we were talking in hushed, anticipatory tones as if we were at a golf tournament. Seventh green. That's right.

And it's a beautiful day for regolith excavation today. Here we are on the morning of May the 12th at 7.30 a.m. and soon to be the site of the 2007 regolith excavation challenge. Yeah, now we can't wait for the first of these little excavating robots to get out here. You must be pretty excited, except that you've been through a bunch of these. I've been through a bunch of these, but every single one is an individual. They're all special, and this one is going to be especially fun because, for a number of reasons, there's a lot of firsts going on here.

This is the first regular simulant sandbox that's ever been put together, and it's been put together by DeAnnie Construction Company and the California Space Authority on a grant made possible with a grant by NASA Centennial Challenges and the Innovative Partnerships Program Office. And with a lot of support from the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, and I should mention everybody else in the world.

From all the centers. The little people and the big people. And they're all big people in our books. But it's going to be really exciting because there are a number of real world. I mean, you could talk about the competitions being small scale and, you know, maybe not being of scientific rigor or, you know. But they are, number one, operational, technical, and technology demonstrators. And, number two, getting this box together was an eye-opener for even the NASA researchers. I heard this was more, this is more regolith in one place than has ever been put together before?

This is the first lunar regolith simulant sandbox that's ever been put together. It's eight tons of simulant, four by four meter box, up to a depth of about 35 centimeters, 25 centimeters or so. And again, I can't believe it's the first time it's ever been done. But in the last 40 years since we've been to the moon, this is it. This is the first time, and it's really exciting to see it. And what's going to be exciting, and because there's real world first, I just asked the contractor how he's going to get all the regolith out and put it back into the one-ton bags that it came from.

They're taking a bobcat at the end of the competition. They're going to bring one of these earth movers, little baby earth movers, and they're going to just start really excavating this stuff, you know, for the first time. It's never been done before. And so it's funny to see some of the programs that we've put together trying to show how technologies are going to do this and the other thing. And we're just going to bang it out here, and, you know, we're going to have some real-world experience. So I'm hoping somebody's videoing that. Oh, I'm sure they will be.

Are you surprised by the reception that these challenges have gotten? I mean, I'm sure everybody at NASA hoped this would attract a lot of attention and really get people fired up. But the excitement over the various competitions, all of these challenges, I think has gotten incredible coverage. I had to subscribe to Popular Science and Popular Mechanics about a year ago because we were just showing up in their magazine every other month. And it's a popular science. I mean, we're taking science and you're making it a game. And as much as it might seem to people that I'm trivializing it, I mean, to me, it's the

Mary Poppins effect here. In every job that must be done, there's an element of fun. You find the fun and snap the job's a game. There you go. And so, yes, it's a surprise that people are enjoying this, but it makes so much sense. And, again, yeah, we're not going to the 99th degree of scientific accuracy, but, hey, you know, at the end of the day, there's going to be people here that are going to say, I've dug in a sandbox, and nobody's ever done that before.

Well, this is, it seems to me, as much about inspiration as it is about developing new technologies. That's it. And that's one of the elements of the prize culture. I did an informal, I'm not a sociologist kind of survey. I wrote a paper on it. And just one element of the prize culture is the inspiration. Hey, if so-and-so can do it, I can do it. I mean, that was true back when the two crazy bicycle mechanics from Dayton went out and started flying.

They were competing against Samuel Pierpont Langley of the Smithsonian Institution, and they were able to beat him off. And just so many people are really, really able to envision themselves doing it once they see this. Some of the excavators that are here, they were put together in a matter of days, and we'll see how they perform. And, you know, they're not the prettiest things maybe to look at. I mean, the high technology from one to the other might be the fact that one guy painted his wood silver and the other guy didn't. But, I mean, we're going to see what happens.

I mean, the point of the whole prize is, you know, getting technology readiness levels from the lower levels where you study it and analyze it and you write papers about it to the point where you actually just go in and you play in it. And that's where we're at, you know. And who knows if anybody will be successful, if anybody's going to get the prize today. But you know from other experience that amazing things can happen between one year and the next. Absolutely. That's where you see a maturity of the technology is from the first year to the second. You saw that in the DARPA Grand Challenge. We're seeing it in our earlier competitions. We were able to give away $200,000 last week at the glove competition, and that was very exciting.

You know, if we do our jobs right, the rules are going to be stringent enough. You're going to be actually proving something when you win the money. If we do a bad job writing the rules, it's possible that you can skirt them and you can figure out a way to win the money without delivering technology. But at the astronaut glove competition last week, we had Bill Spenney from the Johnson Space Center down there. He's the glove subsystems manager. When the ISS astronauts have a problem up on station, they call Bill to find out what's

going on. He was at the glove competition last week, and he was impressed with what he saw. There was more than one glove that had very good technology there. And there's a long, granted, it's a long road from the competition winner to, you know, actually having a glove that's on station, you know, and used by NASA astronauts. But, you know, it's the seeds of innovation that you're looking for. It's the start of it. It's the sparks that you're looking for there, the creativity.

And so that's what this whole program is, you know, bred to, you know, create. And we're seeing the results from that. We're working on making sure that there's a bridge from those sparks of innovation to NASA itself by, in the Lunar Lander Challenge, for example, the Johnson Space Center Lunar Lander folks invited Armadillo, the one team that competed at XPRIZE Cup last year, to come down and to spend some time with them. There's a lot of talk going on within NASA right now and inviting the Astronaut Club competitors to come down and to spend some time with them. There's a lot of talk going on within NASA right now and inviting the astronaut club competitors to come down to talk.

And I've already gotten a ton of e-mails saying that if the excavators are showing something that is of interest, they're going to want to talk to them as well. So there's the bridge. We're creating the bridge back into NASA because that's always one big question. How is NASA going to use this? And it might be we never use it. But, I mean, we haven't figured out a way to bottle creativity and innovation yet. But this is the closest thing we've got to it, I think.

You know, one of the best things about this is hearing your enthusiasm. Well, I'm easily enthused. I mean, that's about it. But it's right there. I mean, you're looking at a pit of regolith, and nobody's ever done that before. I mean, it's incredible. And that just amazes me. I'm easily amazed.

What can I say? Incredible. And that just amazed me. I'm easily amazed. What can I say? Ken Davidian, NASA's program manager for the Centennial Challenges, including the Lunar Regolith Challenge and six other competitions in this year alone. The digging begins when we return in just a minute.

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You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. This week we offer special coverage of the recent Lunar Regolith Challenge,

where a $250,000 prize was offered to any team that could create a robot that could dig up enough moon dirt in a half hour or less. The day officially began with introductory comments from several special guests and the organizers of the challenge. Deborah Hirsch is Executive Director of the California Space Education and Workforce Institute, or SISUI. Her staff pulled together the event under contract with NASA. The lunar challenge is looming, and I know all of you in this audience, you're all space enthusiasts, I think, know that we're going back to the moon, and we could be there as early as 12 years,

maybe even sooner. Maybe there'll even be a race again like we had with Sputnik. There are some big things coming very, very fast. You are seeing today history. Sisui is what NASA refers to as a Centennial Challenge affiliate. NASA program manager Ken Davidian explained to the crowd that the space agency only puts up the prize money. That means the affiliate organizations play a vital role. All of them are running competitions for us at no cost to the government,

and we really, really appreciate that because we realize that every time somebody puts on a competition, it costs between $50,000 and $500,000, depending on the competition. So this is not an insignificant contribution that these organizations are making to fulfilling NASA's vision. Ken Davidian was just one of many NASA representatives participating. Rob Kneeler is an engineer and the deputy manager of the agency's excavation research program. He has spent the last two years developing and testing techniques for moving lunar regolith. So what kind of role does this kind of competition play in your work at NASA? Well, this allows us to look at innovative concepts, lateral thinking,

new ways of looking at problems that may be completely outside of the NASA way of thinking. Now, from what I'm told, even you guys haven't seen this much regolith simulant in one place before. After Apollo, there was not so much interest in producing this regolith simulant. So the supplies dwindled over the years, and it ran out. So we have a new project in place now led by Marshall Space Flight Center. But this is the first time since Apollo that we've accumulated this much regolith simulant. We actually have four metric tons of regolith simulant here today, which is the largest quantity that I know of that has ever been assembled in one spot.

Why is excavation something that NASA wants to put money into to research? Well, there are many uses for lunar regolith. Instead of bringing everything from Earth, we would like to use the resources that we have on the moon. So one of the main resources on the moon is the lunar soil or regolith. It consists of 40% oxygen, oxides of silicon, and metals. And the metals are iron, aluminum, and titanium. So actually, the byproduct of making oxygen could be other useful products, such as metals, which could then be used to make parts. So the whole idea is to minimize the amount of mass

that you have to bring from the Earth to the moon and provide the first steps towards self-sustainability on the moon. While many robot building teams expressed interest in the challenge, just four actually made it to Santa Maria. Each still faced challenges on the morning of the competition, including one group that couldn't figure out why their digger was performing a bit anemically. We're only drawing about 10 watts. That's a good thing, isn't it?

Since we're allowed to draw 30, that's a really bad thing. We'd love to draw what we're allowed to draw. So not sure why. We have to run on inverters to get from 5 volts up to the 12 volts that our motors run on. And so once it gets to 12, it should take off and hold 12, but it's not. So we're very curious why that's the case. Chatting with the various teams was a special guest. Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, also an engineer,

seemed to be fascinated by the approaches adopted by each team as well as by the enormous amount of work they had done. How do you keep it level? Oh. I mean, everything in there seems to me to be, it's got a slope to it, doesn't it? Yeah, that may be somewhat of a surprise for us. Oh, yeah?

We thought, they've said more or less level. More or less. The devil's in the detail, Ben. That's true. Over on the other side of the cavernous hall were a bunch of middle school kids who seemed to be at least as fascinated by their own tiny robots made of Lego blocks. These machines were also designed to get a job done either shoving or tugging another robot off the playing field.

One, two, three, go. I think that way that would be a trial. Come on, Oliver. Put your hands in the box. Yes! It was finally time for the competition to begin. The big regolith sandbox was set up outside in a billowing tent. The hundreds of spectators would have to watch the action on giant TV monitors,

while those of us who were allowed to come closer had to be protected from the lunar dust. Safety officer Ian McKnight was there to make sure we followed the rules. You made me put on my mask when I came out here. I did. That's true, we did. The main reason is because this material that we've got out here has some silica oxide in it, and we're not really quite sure what it does health-wise. So far it's got a minimal health risk rating, so we just want to make sure nobody's going to inhale this stuff.

Well, I appreciate that. I bet in 25 or 30 years they've never before this asked you to put together a sandbox full of lunar dirt. No, this is a first for us. So that's why we're taking precautions to make sure that we do it right. I think it's a first for anybody. I think so, too. The first of the robots was carefully carried out to the sandbox. Built by Duplex Engineering of Michigan, it used a wheel with scoops or buckets designed to scour the regolith. A conveyor belt would then deposit

the incredibly fine material into a big box that sat on a carefully calibrated digital scale. With the machine secured in the regolith and plugged into the external power supply, the digging began with the ringing of a decidedly low-tech bell. Team leader Jeff Polk had gone for simplicity. No microprocessors, just a couple of relays and a diode directed his machine back and forth across the sandbox. And he seemed to be off to a good start. All went well for nearly ten minutes when, suddenly, disaster struck. One of the little scoops or buckets came loose and jammed the wheel.

It was the agony of defeat for Jeff, even as his robot kept trying to do its work. I'm kind of disappointed because that was shipping damage right there. My bucket wheel was really twisted and mangled when I got it out of the package. So I bent and hammered it straight as best I could, but some of the solder joints on it, I guess, had just seen too much abuse, and one of them failed. Because we had moved a lot more stimulant than this at home without a single problem. And just the stress of pulling all the regulators bent the frame right out. Yeah, it just got wiggled enough that one of the buckets bent sideways.

Is that to pull the plug? Yep, pull the plug. That's got to kill you that you can't just reach in there and bend that thing out of the way. Yeah, that would be a simple fix. I'm trying to think, is there anything I could have done to avoid it? And not really. It was built properly. It was built properly. It was damaged in shipping. And that's what killed it. Something you want to try again

in a year if you get the opportunity? Oh, absolutely. If there's still prize money next year, I'll come back here with a bigger, better device and move a whole lot more regionally. Sadly, that first performance was not bettered by any of the other three robots. The last to compete may have been even more of a heartbreaker. Students from the University of Missouri at Rollo had worked on their machine for nearly two years. They drove all night to reach California only to discover a problem that would keep them up for yet another night. Their so-called lunar miner did at last make it to the sandbox where in less than a minute, smoke began to emerge from its control circuits.

Time once again to pull the plug. So was the day a success? Everyone from Ken Davidian to the competitors to the middle school kids with their Lego robots said the same thing. Of course it was. Joining the chorus was former Congresswoman Andrea Seastrand, executive director of the California Space Authority. The authority is the parent of SISUI, the California Space Education and Workforce Institute that had organized the event. 451 people came through our doors today. And what's exciting, it's moms and dads with their children. And to have the regolith competition going on

and then to have the young people with their robo-challenges. You also had four teams that put a lot of sweat and tremendous ingenuity into these efforts. Nobody won. Not the first time that's happened with a centennial challenge. No, I understand they had a first winner with the Astronaut Club last week. I don't think there was a loser here today. While they didn't win the big prize, everybody was a winner. Never been done before.

And so we were hearing from NASA that, you know, everybody was very jealous of us because we had the first big sandbox to play in. So that was interesting. And now you're off to celebrate with all the folks who became part of this. Yes. We wanted definitely to have a celebration tonight, a good old-fashioned Central Coast Santa Maria-style barbecue. Well, go have a great time, and we'll look forward to seeing you again next year. I would like to remind everybody that the prize will be $500,000, but because no one was successful this

year, the $250,000 will be rolled into the $500,000 for next year, and the prize is $750,000. So I would just say to all those out there, you might start looking at what you can do next year because now we're talking about real money, $750,000. Yeah, $250,000 here, $250,000 there. Pretty soon you've got real money. Real dollars, that's right. Thanks so much, Andrea. Thank you. Thank you.

Andrea C. Strand, Executive Director of the California Space Authority. Want to go for the gold? You'll find a link to the Centennial Challenge and California Space Authority websites at planetary.org. That's where we'll also have links to YouTube videos of the lunar regolith robots in action and some of the still photos I took at the event. See you next year. Hey, boys and girls, it's time for What's Up with Bruce Betts,

the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Why, here he is right now. Come on in, Bruce. Oh, thanks. Hey, what are you doing? I'm introducing this like it was Chucko the Clown. I juggled, but it's radio. We need a bozo-type theme song if we're going to do this, I guess.

But this is serious stuff. At least we have Bozo-type people. Thank you. Present company accepted. Well, it's serious but fun stuff. Fun stuff, absolutely. That's kind of the point. Speaking of fun stuff.

Venus. Venus, fun. Can't help but mention it first. Hey, Venus. It's bright. Hey, Venus, big bright up there in the evening sky in the west. Can't miss it. If you look for two bright stars near it, although they don, Venus. Big, bright up there in the evening sky in the west. Can't miss it. If you look for two bright stars near it, although they don't look very bright compared to Venus,

you will notice Castor and Pollux looking similar, the twins of Gemini. And then you can flip your head around without hurting yourself. And towards the other horizon, off there in the east, you will see Jupiter looking really, really bright also, though not as bright as Venus. And if you look up above Jupiter, always the reddish bright star there is Antares, which is the beating heart of Scorpius. That's very nice. Anyway, it's a big red giant star looking kind of reddish.

And in between Jupiter and Venus, much closer to Venus, is Saturn looking bright but much dimmer than the other two. Venus and Saturn will be growing closer and closer together as we approach the end of June. Look for them to snuggle very close to each other at the very end of the month. And Mars, still up in the pre-dawn sky, looking dim off there and reddish in the east. Let's move on to this week in space history. 1989, Voyager 2 was doing that Neptune thing. Doing our first ever and last ever so far up close look at the Neptunian system.

And four years ago, Spirit was launched. And then shortly thereafter, Opportunity, the Mars rovers, of course, still going strong or relatively strong up there on Mars. Going on three and a half years. Very impressive. Let us move now to random space fact. I just gave him a thumbs up. It looked like I wasn't doing that well. No, you were doing great. I gave you a double thumbs up, two thumbs up. a thumbs up. You're judging me. It looked like I wasn't doing that well. No, you were doing great.

I gave you a double thumbs up. Two thumbs up. Two thumbs up, okay. Speaking of two thumbs up, well, sort of, there are two objects involved. Up what? I was going to say. Let's not. Ganymede, largest moon in the solar system, of course, but that's not a random space fact.

It's too obvious. Ganymede is twice as far from Europa, the next moon in at Jupiter, as the Earth-moon distance. Oh, okay. So those things are kind of spread out there, those moons. That's kind of the point here, picking a couple semi-random ones. And then Callisto gets even farther out and farther from Ganymede, and then there's all those little ones swarming around doing their little moon things.

Let's go on to the trivia contest. We asked you, what was the first NASA Earth-observing satellite launched as part of what is dubbed the Afternoon Constellation, also known as the A-Train, the first one launched? How did we do? You know, we had a couple people who said Terra. No, it was not Terra. There is an Earth-observing satellite called Terra. No, it was not Terra. There is an Earth-observing satellite called Terra.

But no, you very clearly said, which was the first in the afternoon constellation of the A-train. And among the people who got it right, Ilya Schwartz, he's not our winner, I'm sorry, but I only mention him because he gave the whole series. Aura, do you have it there? I have it here. I do. I've got it, yes. Check these out. Is it Aura, Calypso, CloudSat, and Parasol? He's looking.

Yeah, I wouldn't have them in that order, but it's close enough. A bunch of really cool Earth-observing remote-sensing satellites all kind of trailing each other in Earth orbit making multiple observations. Well, that will make Barbara Wright a very, very happy listener to Planetary Radio because Barbara.

Oh, I hope she won. Yeah, she did. First time winner. And she does say it's Barbara, not Barbara, but Barbara Wright of Pioneer City. No, sorry, I'm getting this wrong. Cary, North Carolina is where she's from, and she did say Aura. So congratulations, Barbara. So a planetary radio T-shirt headed out to Barbara.

You betcha. Excellent. Well, for those of you who'd like to try your hand at winning a planetary radio T-shirt, here's your question. What was the first human-made object in space? In space, no requirements to orbit here. And you can use either of the standard definitions of space. It's similar enough in this case. A hint, at least time-wise, it's not a manhole cover.

Which, oddly enough, you will find on the Internet. We were talking about this before we started recording, and you said there is this urban myth or cosmic myth. There's a cosmic myth, and it's really hard to nail down how much reality, certainly the ultimate form of the myth is bogus. But yes, a manhole cover, actually a steel plate on top of an underground nuclear weapons test was accelerated upwards, supposedly reached escape velocity. So whether it did or whether it didn't, it's still not the winner.

Okay. So which object? You may get some confusion on which date, but I'm asking you what type of object was the first object. And it was not a sock. So how do they enter? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter.

Send us your answer. If you'd like to be funny with this one, we always appreciate it. We may or may not give you a prize, but we may talk about you on the radio. If it's really, really funny, we could give a prize to the funny one and to the person, somebody who gets it right.

And to the randomly selected right answer one. That'd be good. That'd be good. All right. They got till June 11, Monday, June 11 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that humorous or accurate entry. And there you go. All right, everybody go out there, look up in the night sky and think about salt.

Lots and lots of salt. That's it? Table salt, the sodium chloride salt? Yeah. It's just not man-made, so it wouldn't count if it was in space. It's not the answer. It's not a hint to the quiz, I guess. Oh, I'm sorry. No, no, it was not. And it was not something, I don't know that it was restricted in the salt treaties, but that's irrelevant. Good one, good one.

There he is, rubbing it into our wounds, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He's Bruce Betts, and he joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week, everyone. Thank you.