A scene from NASA Robotics Mining Competition 2015. Image credit: Meredith Chandler, NASA. You can see more of Meredith’s excellent photographs here: https://plus.google.com/collection/QN3Mb

We just completed the 6th annual NASA Robotics Mining Competition, and like always it was awesome! This year, 46 universities from around the United States brought robots to mine the simulated Martian soil and win the coveted Joe Kosmo Award. Every year it has been an amazing success. We have learned valuable lessons that will make it possible for humans to go to Mars safely and affordably.

Why Mine on Mars?

A Mars mining robot by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Image credit: Meredith Chandler, NASA

Studies have shown we can dramatically cut the cost of human missions to Mars if we use local resources: the water ice beneath the Martian soil and the carbon dioxide in its atmosphere.  With these we can create methane and oxygen for rocket propellants, and we can provide air and water for the crew. Water ice is easier to excavate at the Martian poles where it lies right on the surface. At lower latitudes it is buried beneath the soil that shades it from the sun. For affordable human missions to Mars, we need mining robots that can dig up the ice and haul it to chemical processors.

Mars mining will be difficult for several reasons: small digging force, abrasive dust, getting stuck, long communications delay, and nobody to fix them.

Mini-Me Mining

A Mars mining robot by Kent State University. Image credit: Meredith Chandler, NASA

Why would these robots have only a small digging force?  Because we can’t afford to build super enormous rockets capable of launching giant mining trucks to Mars. We have to send mini-mining trucks, instead.  When they get to Mars, the gravity there is much less than it is on Earth.  With both low mass and low gravity they will have a very low weight, which means they have very low traction on the ground beneath their wheels or treads, so they won’t have much force to push a digging bucket into soil or ice. We need innovative digging systems that can work with very low force!  In the next post I will show some of these innovative designs that students have built for the NASA Robotics Mining Competition.

Nonplussed by the Dust

Some dust raised by the West Virginia robot in the 2012 competition. Image credit: Phil Metzger, NASA

And what’s so bad about the Martian dust?  Because it is very abrasive and gets into everything, and eventually it will jam up the mechanisms of mining robots and make them stop functioning.  How long do they need to keep functioning?  Studies have shown that there is so much digging to do that it will take them more than a year to get it finished.  Fortunately, they will have enough time.  We send missions to Mars only once every two years when the planets line up, and then it takes 6 months of travel time to make the journey.  That leaves 18 months for robotic mining before we send the humans.  We want to know all the fuel is successfully made before the humans are committed onto the interplanetary trajectory.  It’s good we have that much time, because the robots are small and won’t be nearly as fast as the giant mining trucks on Earth. If only they can keep mining in the harsh martian dust for 18 months! We need to develop innovative methods for keeping dust out. At the NASA Robotics Mining Competition, robots are awarded points if their mechanisms are enclosed to keep out the dust, if they use brushes or other devices to remove dust, and if they avoid throwing dust on themselves while operating.

Little Wheel Keep On Turning

The heartbreak of getting stuck. As far as I can tell, no robot is immune. This is the North Dakota robot in the 2014 competition. Image credit: Phil Metzger, NASA

Getting stuck in the regolith is a constant threat. Regolith, like all granular materials, is a complex fluid that can transition from solid-like to fluid-like behaviors, and the scientists and engineers who study it (like I do) have not gotten the physics all figured out yet. I’ve even heard eminent colleagues laugh at the idea that we could get it figured out within the next 50 years! It’s amazing that such a common material has evaded an explanation for so long.  The French scientist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb did the first soil mechanics experiment way back in 1776. We have lots of experience working with regolith here on Earth so we have learned how to design wheels pretty well, but not so much for small robots in low-gravity worlds like Mars, nor with fluffy extraterrestrial soil that cannot simply be taken into a geotechnical lab and measured.

Nevertheless, we must do our best. Whenever the wheels push regolith in the wrong way, it switches to its fluid-like behavior and flows around the wheels freely, providing no traction for the robots to move. In other words, the robots get stuck. In the NASA Robotics Mining Competition, getting stuck is an all-too-common, heart-breaking occurrence. Of the robots that don’t suffer communications or computer failures, about half get stuck. By studying them over the years, we have learned a lot of tricks to design better robots. Unfortunately, the competition is still at Earth’s gravity, but at least we are using realistic regolith and small robots so much of the physics is relevant. Eventually, we will take our mining robots into reduced gravity aircraft for their final tests.

Robots on a Long Leash

The communications time delay between Earth and Mars can be large, as much as 21 minutes one-way. The means, if the operators on Earth see from the robot’s cameras that it is driving toward a cliff, their “STOP” command will get back to the robot over 40 minutes too late. Obviously, we can’t operate Mars mining robots using joystick commands from Earth. We need autonomous mining.

Now one idea is to put humans on Mars’ lower moon, Phobos, and let them teleoperate the robots that are down on the Martian surface using joystick commands.  Communication satellites around Mars will relay the control signals from Phobos (as it quickly circles the globe) to the future landing site on the surface.  The time delay will be no more than a second or two. I think that is a grand idea!  NASA wants to send humans to Mars by the 2030’s, and it’s likely (considering the budget shortfalls and the amount of other things we have to develop before then) that we won’t have fully autonomous mining ready in time. By doing the mining from Phobos, the surface missions can proceed on time. And while they are mining from Phobos, we will be learning more about how the robots function in the Martian regolith and gravity, so that our automation software can be perfected. Then, additional missions to Mars won’t need missions to Phobos each time.

Robots Helping Robots

The robots on the surface of Mars will need to do all this without breaking down for about a year and a half. If they do break down, there won’t be a robot repair shop to fix them. They need to be very reliable designs.

One solution is to send a swarm of small robots, so even if a few break down then there will be more to complete the task. This year at the NASA Robotics Mining Competition, five different teams brought multiple-robot systems. Every one of these was a completely different concept. This is why we have this competition. It brings in the vast creativity of college students and gives them the freedom to take risks and try new things.

Another strategy is to put a robotic repair shop on Mars. Many minerals contain metals that can be extracted and refined. This metal could be used by a 3D printer to make spare parts, and a robot with some dexterity could replace parts to fix a broken robot. We probably won’t build a robotic robot repair shop for the earliest Mars missions, but it is the eventual goal.

Next Steps

So what is the next step for Mars mining?  Every year, the head judge of the competition, Rob Mueller, has been evolving the rules to push it towards more realism. In the first years of the competition there were no rules about dust, for example. Just this year, simulated ice was added to the regolith beneath 20 cm of dry soil, and teams that dug down into the ice got extra points. I think the competition will continue to evolve as we get closer to building the actual mining robots for Mars. Eventually, the in-house NASA team will build some flight-like prototypes and put them through final tests. Then, it’s off to Mars.

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I collect sand as a hobby and for science.  One of the things I love doing is going on a sand safari, a trip especially to collect sand. These trips helped my development as a scientist and they are fun. I haven’t been on a sand safari in a long time and I started realizing it’s time. I want your opinion whether this would be fun to do with a group as science-outreach activity—like a hands-on version of a “star talk”—and is it something you might want to participate in? First, let me explain a bit more…

On a sand safari in Hawaii in 2010.

Most sand safaris have been opportunistic.  When I traveled somewhere for work, I took a day of vacation at the destination and paid the extra travel costs so I could collect sand. I’ve done this in New Zealand (north of Aukland), Australia (Queensland), Canada (Toronto to Sudbury), Maine (Southern and Midcoast up to the North Woods), and California (Marin County to Big Sur).  I’ve also driven much of Florida for sand, but Florida is a long state and I haven’t been to some of the extremities.  Mainly, these trips are an excuse to enjoy nature. It pushes me to go farther, to hike, to swim, to climb, and to enjoy its beauty. In California I was climbing down cliffs to get to the beaches, or hiking miles through forests with waterfalls. It’s hard to have better days than that. One of the best trips was renting a mountain bike in San Francisco, riding across the Golden Gate Bridge into the headland of Marin County and then out to the beaches. Another trip I will never forget ended far north of Brisbane, Australia, close to midnight. I was on a deserted beach with no Moon in the sky. It was so dark that I truly couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. That trip gave me the best view of the Milky Way I have ever had.  The prior night I had sat on a beach south of Brisbane and looked across the ocean, thinking of sailing ships crossing the seas from England. Great memories. There are also trips where you have to swim to a sandbar or wade across rivers or hike waste-deep to the end of a sand spit where river and ocean meet, just to get to the special sample. Kayaking to small islands in Maine has also been fun. It’s as much about the adventure of getting to the sample as it is about having it in the collection.

A sand safari with NASA interns in 2009.

Sand from Kalalau Beach in Hawaii. Image credit: Psammophile  via Wikimedia

I was once asked by a reporter in Italy to give him my thoughts on sand collecting because people were stealing sand from historic and sensitive beaches. I agree that special beaches should be protected against collecting, but I also pointed out that more sand is carried away in beach towels and hair every year than by all the sand collectors. (I did the math to show that.) Even if every human in the world collected sand from Florida, the effect on the peninsula would be unmeasurable. Sand from the ocean bottom is brought to the beaches and vice versa by waves and currents, so you would have to remove enough sand to lower the ocean floor to make a difference. But that doesn’t excuse irresponsible collecting. Responsible collecting helps kids develop an appreciation for the outdoors and a love for geology but also the desire to protect nature. Sand collecting can also be helpful for science. As a scientist I am trying to preserve a record of the world’s sand before Homo destructus (mankind) changes everything. Some beaches no longer have their natural sand, because man-made jetties disrupted the beach currents so they eroded the sand away, then local communities hauled in sand from elsewhere to replace it. I am thinking of some citizen science ideas that we might want to discuss later to collect and document the world’s sand. (I have a different idea to discuss today.)

Star sand from Okinawa. Every sand grain is the five-pointed shell of a microscopic organism.

On some sand safaris I’ve focused on the adventure of getting there, but on others I’ve focused on science, studying the geology of the location before the trip and then trying to identify as much of it as I can while there. I have also done experiments with sand while on the trip:  playing in rivers or on beaches to see how water sorts minerals and grain sizes. When the samples come home, they go under the microscope for a full description recorded on each sample’s index card. Sometimes under the microscope you find a microfossil or a beautiful mineral grain that looks like a tiny gemstone. It’s like entering a magical world, looking at sand in the microscope. You have no idea until you get a really cool sample and see for yourself.  I was astounded when I discovered bryozoans that looked like miniature volcanoes with gemstones all over their slopes in the Cape Canaveral sand. About 1 out of 1000 grains was a bryozoan and I was so enrapt that I collected them with tweezers for hours.  (I have had trouble finding them in later samples.)

Bora-Bora island and its lagoon. Image credit: Samuel Etienne, CC BY-SA 3.0

I have a friend Christopher Maslon who goes on more exotic sand safaris than I do. He buys airline tickets to islands around the Pacific just to collect sand, and we trade samples by mail. Apparently he swims down and collects from deep in the water, as well. (I often collect underwater but never deeper than about 6 feet. My samples labeled DLE are dans l’eau.)  If I had more funds and time, I would love to travel the world just for sand collecting, and maybe I will someday. As I said before, sand collecting is an excuse to go to new places and to push my limits.

So I started feeling the need for another sand safari, lately. I have been to all the places in Florida near enough to drive there and back in one day. Staying overnight on longer trips is a barrier to going, but I got this idea:  I love talking about science and showing people how cool it is, so what if I hosted some sand safaris for other people to come along, and then I could go to those same nearby locations again without losing the excitement? We could meet up at a beach somewhere, bring our own lunches, and do some introductory science. Instead of giving a “star talk”, it would be a “sand talk”, and in fact an entire afternoon of hiking, swimming perhaps, collecting, looking in microscopes, and starting your own collections. I think this could grow into a fun series of events.

I thought maybe I would do just one for starters to see how it goes, to see if the idea works and if people have fun and learn from it. I give talks like this in elementary schools and the students always say it’s tons of fun, but would adults have fun with it, too? So what do you think…is there anybody close enough in Florida who would like to do an easy sand safari? (I wouldn’t recommend traveling far to get here until we find out whether it is actually fun or not. This event won’t rival a NASA tweetup for excitement, for example!) There won’t be any climbing cliffs or seeing waterfalls in Florida, and the geology is rather basic here, but it’s a lot of fun in my opinion, especially if you like the beach. I would tie in as much about space as I could: how sand moves on Earth compared to what we see on other planets and Moons; how we are building technology to work with sand on other bodies in space; the special challenges of working with granular materials; how crabs and lizards and other creatures adapted to sand are inspiring our robotics for space; etc.

Even if you know you couldn’t make it here, could you still let me know whether you think the idea is a good one and offer any suggestions you may have? What topics should we discuss there on the beach (or in a pavilion next to the beach)?  What activities would be best? How long should it last? Should the sand safari be limited to some number of people? How far would people want to travel to do this? Should we include some hiking on the beach or driving to multiple beaches in one afternoon? Any other ideas?

So please let me know what you think. Based on the response I will decide if I should schedule the first trial event. Thank you!

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KSC Moonville spacehacker team at International Space Apps Challenge working on space colonization game.

I am sitting in a room at at the Kennedy Space Center for the International Space Apps Challenge.  It is late at night, I’m very tired, and there are eight other people in the room:  all much younger than me, all college students, all writing software for a game called “Moonville“.  It will be a strategy game where the players simulate the beginnings of industry in the solar system.  I submitted the Moonville topic to the Space Apps Challenge so that eventually people will play the game and through the game develop a winning strategy that we can use to actually start industry in space.  It’s an exercise of double-nested crowdsourcing.  The Space Apps Challenge is crowdsourcing the writing of the game, so the game can crowdsource the development of the strategy for space industry.  I’m amazed how much these students have gotten done already, just sitting here in a room by themselves with their laptops, a wifi, and this older guy (me) answering a few questions.  They started entirely from scratch before dinner.  They plan to be done by lunchtime tomorrow.  I didn’t know this was even possible.

Developing a Moonville game to help colonize the solar system

A few minutes ago they were taking a pizza break, and I told them that the fate of humanity very well could depend on space hackers.  I asked, what if the governments of the world don’t prioritize space highly enough to get lunar industry started?  What if the commercial space companies don’t find enough investors to fund more than their immediate business plans and so are unable to truly colonize space?  Who then will take humanity beyond this planet?  I’m thinking it will have to be the private citizens of the world, space hackers like these young people.  Individually, they may not have billions of dollars like the private investors, or trillions of dollars like the governments of the world, but collectively they have much, much more.

For example, there are seven billion of us here on planet Earth, so what if just four billion of us paid one dollar a year for ten years into this future in space?  That would amount to forty billion dollars.  That should be enough to get the job done.  Just one dollar a year.  Surely we can do that.

But we might not convince four billion people to participate.  Too many people don’t understand that a higher level of civilization is really possible.  It seems too much like science fiction and so they don’t want to throw away their dollar.  So here is another idea.  How about if just the space enthusiasts of the world do it?  We have something more valuable than cash, after all.  We have our abilities and our time.  We could start developing the relevant technologies in our garages.  Some of us could build lunar soil-mining robots.  (There are already hundreds of people building robots in their garages for competitions and for fun.)  Other enthusiasts could develop soil-to-metal refineries in the Hackerspaces that are popping up all over the world.  Others could adapt 3D printers for use with lunar-derived feedstock.  Still others could write software to teleoperate this equipment.  How about if we agree to build these things for a few years and then bring it together to a volcano or to a desert location for a full-up, lunar-analog field test?  We could demonstrate the equipment functioning like it would on the Moon, robots building robots from nothing but the soil and some ice and the sunlight as inputs.  (We could add some carbon dioxide and ammonia to the water ice to better simulate the chemistry of lunar ice.)  It would certainly be a grand party, as well as a great field test!  You could count me in!

So how about if we do this every other year for a decade or two, improving our technologies until we have engineered an entire set of hardware that can build a copy of itself?  It would be like the Global Village Construction Set, but designed for the Moon.  It would be a tangible demonstration that self-sufficient space industry is now possible, that humanity can master the solar system and possess billions of times greater capacity to do things than we can here on planet Earth.  It would demonstrate the imminence of human civilization at a truly higher level and the possibility to solve the big global problems including pollution, poverty, and resource depletion.  It would give hope and excitement to the next generation of youth.  It would enable us to do great things on Earth, in our solar system, and in the galaxy.  If we do this — in our spare time in our garages — how could the politicians and the corporate financiers of the world fail then to pay the last bit of cost in sending it to the Moon?

The eight space hackers busily writing software here where I sit are by no means alone in the International Space Apps Challenge.  Over nine thousand space enthusiasts are participating in this event tonight.  Some are in other rooms of this building, working on more of the 52 challenges besides Moonville.  And participants are all over the world, including the 83 official event locations in places like Tokyo, Manila, Abu Dhabi, Managua, Nairobi, New York — cities in 44 countries on all seven continents.  Eleven of the locations are completely “sold out” with no room for more participants.  According to the NASA website, those are in Adelaide, Bangalore, Bogota, Guatemala City, London, Monterrey, Recife, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Santa Marta, Santiago and Toronto.  Space enthusiasm is not limited to the countries that are already flying in space!  It is a global phenomenon.  The young people that I am watching in this room are right now collaborating with others in Ecuador.  Meanwhile, I’m answering Moonville questions from Lieden, emailing participants in Rome, waiting for the 2:30 a.m. Google Hangout with Jakarta, typing this blog post, and reflecting on how the fate of humanity might depend on young space hackers like these.

And you know what?  I’m feeling pretty good about that.

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Do you want to be a space explorer?

Many internet billionaires are turning into commercial space explorers:  flying as space tourists, building and launching their own rockets, and starting space mining companies. They do this because the technology to take human civilization into the solar system has arrived.  Space colonization is now possible, and we can solve many of Earth’s greatest problems, too, by bringing the billion-fold greater resources of our solar system into our economic sphere.  The greatest entrepreneurs of our time have sensed that this will be the golden age of space and they want to make it happen.

Well, that can be a signal to the rest of us.  It’s time to get involved in space!  Let’s not get left out from what may be the most important movement of our times.  A few of us might get jobs working for a government space agency, and many more might work for the commercial space companies, but we can all be citizen space explorers! The same technologies that are opening up space are also making it more participatory.

This  blog will focus on this movement of human civilization into space:  exploring it, mining it, utilizing its resources, setting up profitable commerce, establishing a self-sustaining industry, and eventually building colonies beyond the Earth.  In the coming posts I will have a lot to say about this fledgling movement known as “citizen space exploration.”  I am a physicist and planetary scientist at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center* and have worked in this field for almost 30 years.  I co-founded the Granular Mechanics and Regolith Operations Lab located in the KSC Swamp Works.  We develop technologies to land on extraterrestrial bodies, to drive on and to dig in the soil, to mine its resources, to process them for human exploration and industry, to build with the local resources, and to study them for science.  Many of us in the space industry believe we see the way forward to rapidly move humanity beyond a single planet and solve world problems.  This is my passion and calling as a scientist and technologist.  I am excited to play a role in this.  It could be the most interesting time in all human history to be alive!  We are on the verge of leaping over the barrier that exists here at the end of our Kardashev Type I civilization (more on that later) to establish a Type II civilization, one that is no longer bound to a single planet, so that we can really make the entire solar system our home.  Wow!  What will the world be like when we have literally a billion times greater capacity through robotics and space resources to make goods and services, to do science and engineering, to support the arts and literature, and to do everything that together are called “civilization”?  It is truly hard to imagine, just as it would have been hard for an ancient Sumerian to imagine what we can do in the type of civilization we have today.

We are already experiencing an explosion of the technologies that will make this possible:  robotics, artificial intelligence, automated manufacturing, and so on.  And for me it is all the more exciting because space exploration is becoming democratized.  It will no longer be the exclusive domain of professional rocket scientists.  Its explorers and settlers will be a cross section of our entire population, including people just like you.  So if you want to be a part of this great movement in human history, you can.  First there are things we can do here on Earth to make it happen.  Then there may be opportunities for telepioneering, where we privately own and operate robots in space to directly participate in space commerce and to create the worlds where we will be going.  And just beyond that, we may have opportunities to go there.  Through this blog, please allow me share my excitement and ideas for how we can help humanity take this great leap, how through space resources and technology we can move our world rapidly into something much more vibrant and vastly more exciting than the world we have known so far.

* B.N., all opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent NASA, the federal government, or the Kennedy Space Center.

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