Lockheed Martin Exploring Program Post 1010
Botball Research Project

Botball Team
08-0092

Authors
Elwin Wang
Arvind Harinder
Zeshan Tariq David Gaynor
 

Outline
Home
Mission
Robot
Experiment
Conclusion
Bibliography

 

Related Links
Post1010
NASA Robots
Mars Rovers
the Moon

 

The Lockheed Martin Exploring Program Botball Team 92 is submitting this report for the 2008 X PRIZE Lunar Rover Botball Design Challenge.

We have designed a lunar rover capable of exploring various aspects of the lunar surface.

Mission
Our primary objective is to find deposits of helium-3 on the moon. Indian President Abdul Kalam proposed that the energy that would be provided by all the helium-3 on the moon would be ten times more than that of Earth’s fossil fuels [2].  

Our goal is to land on the lunar surface then search for and excavate helium-3 isotope located beneath the surface. Objectives also include traveling 500 meters and capturing panoramic high definition video and still images of the lunar surface. Our craft must be able to transmit a “near real time” moon-cast of the collected content back to earth.

Our team will only focus on the exploration aspect of the challenge. We will leave the launching and landing of the rover to a separate rocket team.

Where We Will Look

We will land on the nearside of the moon, where we believe the greatest concentration of helium-3 can be found [1]. The helium-3 on the nearside is located in the vicinity of TiO2, which is detectable through its properties as a photocatalyst.

We will direct our search in the Mare Cognitum, a sea close to the landing site of Apollo 14. We hope that its crater form will allow us to drive our rover on consistently flat land, which will allow us to conduct our spiral search pattern without much restriction [3][4].
 

Conclusion
Essentially, we plan to take existing technology and mission elements to initiate the exploration of the Lunar seas. Not only will we scout the area in a 500 meter radius, we will also transmit pictures of the lunar surface back to Earth. After it moves our 500 meters, our rover will stop at selected points in our search pattern to drill the lunar surface. Using our titanium dioxide (TiO2) detector, the rover can scan the drilled holes for helium-3 and report back to Earth. Eventually, this helium-3 can be harvested as an alternative fuel source for mankind.