It seems like everyone these days is getting into space. The private company Mars One wants to be on the red planet a decade before NASA gets there. Iran is so desperate to exit earth's atmosphere it launched a monkey into space. At least three private companies are publically talking about mining asteroids for fuel so that we can become a space-faring species.
The big question, though, isn't so much how we get there. Instead, it's this: What will we do next? What will we drink? How will we power the necessary machines for survival?
Luckily, NASA is working on a solution. The RASSOR, or Regolith Advanced Systems Operations Robot, is a new robot the agency is testing that it hopes will help astronauts find water and fuel on the moon.
The new robot would roam around the surface of the moon, climb over rocks, and dig into the lunar surface to collect soil. RASSOR would then deliver its newly acquired treasure to a processing plant that would extract water, ice, and fuel for human use. Whatever dust is left after water extraction would then be turned into air and fuel.
According to the article published on the Atlantic, RASSOR will "quite literally" get water out of rocks, but upon a closer reading that doesn't seem to actually be the case. It looks like RASSOR will not be able to do any of the actual extraction, at least not in its current prototype state, and instead it'll be the more like the deliveryman.
"The robot would be the feeder for a lunar resource processing plant, a level of industry never before tried anywhere besides Earth," said NASA.
Still, just because the robot itself won't extract water on the spot doesn't make it a less important development. It costs $4,000 to send a single pound into space, so the RASSOR has to be light enough to be cost-effective but heavy enough to work on the moon's surface, where there's less gravity. On top of that, it's got to be powerful enough to perform some substantial digging.
The current RASSOR prototype isn't final, though, so new improvements could be made, along with a new design to make it more similar to the Mars rovers. The next iteration - RASSOR 2 - is expected to be tested in 2014.
