Latest Regolith Stories
The cool, rocky slopes of Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano that is Hawaii's highest mountain, will serve as a stand-in for the moon as researchers from Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, NASA and other organizations test a robot designed for lunar prospecting.During the field experiment, Nov. 1-13, the robot called Scarab will simulate a lunar mission to extract water, hydrogen, oxygen and other compounds that could potentially be mined for use by future lunar explorers. The...
GILLA INC. (OTCBB: GLLA) ("Gilla"), has entered into a definitive agreement effective October 3, 2008 to acquire all the shares of Terra Merchant Resources Corporation ("Terra"), a private company incorporated in Ontario, Canada. Terra has secured rights to a gold exploration property in Angola, known under the name of Salutar Commercio Mining Concession, located some 120 km north of Cabinda City, Angola. The concession covers approximately 200 square kilometers. Through a Joint Venture...
TORONTO, CANADA--(Marketwire - Oct. 1, 2008) - Shoreham Resources Ltd. (TSX VENTURE:SMH) ("SMH" or "Shoreham"), a Canadian based exploration company dedicated to the exploration of advanced precious metal and polymetallic deposits in South America and Canada, is pleased to announce further developments regarding its Potaro-Maple Creek gold and diamond project in Guyana. Pursuant to an agreement with Vannessa Ventures Ltd. (now Infinito Gold Corp. (TSX VENTURE:IG)) finalized in March 2007, the...
A new NASA contest challenges college-level students to design tools or instrument packages that could be used on the next generation of human-driven moon rovers. Students will have the opportunity to engage in NASA's return to the moon by designing equipment that will help astronauts accomplish tasks on the lunar surface.Moon explorers will need to navigate in darkness around the moon's south pole and collect lunar regolith, or moon dust, for on-site analysis and radiation detection. They...
Houston meeting highlights Phoenix's probe and the challenges of working on the surface of MarsNASA's Phoenix Scout Lander reached Mars on May 25,, opened a soils lab, and started looking for water. Phoenix uses a robotic scoop arm to deliver regolith samples to the suite of instruments aboard the Lander--with one exception. The thermal and electrical conductivity probe designed by a team of research scientists at Decagon Devices Inc. is actually mounted on the robotic arm and makes direct...
There are places on the Moon where the sun hasn't shined for millions of years. Dark polar craters too deep for sunlight to penetrate are luna incognita, the realm of the unknown, and in their inky depths, researchers believe, may lie a treasure of great value.NASA is about to light one up.Sometime between May and August 2009, depending on launch dates, the booster stage for NASA's LCROSS probe will deliberately crash into a permanently-shadowed lunar crater at 9,000 km/hr, producing an...
To: TECHNOLOGY EDITORS Contact: Sonja Alexander of NASA Headquarters, Washington, +1- 202-358-1761, sonja.r.alexander@nasa.gov WASHINGTON, July 25 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's Regolith Excavation Challenge is scheduled for Aug. 2-3, 2008, on the campus of the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. The competition requires teams to build a roving excavator that can autonomously navigate, excavate, and transfer approximately 330 pounds of simulated lunar regolith,...
A gigantic telescope on the Moon has been a dream of astronomers since the dawn of the space age. A lunar telescope the same size as Hubble (2.4 meters across) would be a major astronomical research tool. One as big as the largest telescope on Earth "” 10.4 meters across "” would see far more than any Earth-based telescope because the Moon has no atmosphere. But why stop there? In the Moon's weak gravity, it might be possible to build a telescope with a mirror as large as 50 meters...
Imagine landing on the Moon, climbing down the ladder of your spacecraft, and looking around the harsh lunar landscape"”to see another, older spacecraft standing only 200 yards away.That's exactly what happened in November 1969, when astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean stepped out of the Apollo 12 lunar module. There, within walking distance on the edge of a small crater, stood Surveyor 3, an unmanned U.S. spacecraft that had landed in April 1967.Apollo 12's landing site had been chosen...
The latest plans for the Lunar Explorations Orbiter (LEO), a German lunar mission due for launch in 2012, will be presented on Wednesday 22nd August at the European Planetary Science Congress, PotsdamProfessor Ralf Jaumann, from the German aerospace centre DLR, said "The Lunar Explorations Orbiter will be a unique mission. It will consist of two spacecraft flying in formation and taking simultaneous measurements, which will give us the first three-dimensional view of the Moon's magnetic and...
