Unmanned Systems Technology 016 | Hydromea Vertex AUV | Power management systems | Unmanned Space Vehicles | Continental CD-155 turbodiesel | Swift 020 UAV | ECUs | DSEI 2017 Show report

43 2007, all but two of the remaining teams have to send their rovers to the Moon in December 2017 or January 2018. Israel’s SpaceIL was the first to arrange a launch using the Falcon 9 launcher from SpaceX. This was due to launch in the autumn of 2017, but the explosion of the Falcon launcher earlier in the year set it back. The deadline has been extended to March 2018 to allow for SpaceIL and Moon Express (one of the other teams) to have a chance of reaching the surface of the Moon. Another team, Synergy Moon, is using a Neptune 8 rocket from one of its consortium members, Interorbital Systems, to launch from the open ocean off the coast of California, again before the end of 2017. The Neptune 8 is a customised four-stage rocket assembled from 36 engines that can send a 191 kg payload into a lunar orbit and 32 kg to the Moon’s surface. Team Indus from India has used camera technology from the French CNES research agency for its small rover, called ECA. This weighs less than 25 kg and will be delivered in a lander. Japanese team Hakuto was working with US team Astrobotics, which is no longer in the race and so is now partnered with Team Indus. They will be launching both rovers on December 28 from the Sriharikota Space Centre in India on a PSLV rocket system. Two new prizes were added earlier this year to help teams pay for the cost of launch, which can be as high as $5m. The Lunar Arrival Milestone Prize awards $1.75m to spacecraft that complete one orbit around the Moon or enter a direct descent approach to the lunar surface. The Soft Landing Milestone Prize sees $3m awarded to spacecraft that can transmit data proving they soft-landed on the lunar surface. The money will be evenly distributed between all teams who have achieved each milestone by March 31, 2018. The full $20m prize will be awarded to the rover that can travel 500 m, take a picture and send it back to Earth. Mining One of the most ambitious teams, Moon Express, may not even participate in the final stage after all this time. It has already won two Milestone Prizes, the $1m Landing Prize and the $4250,000 Imaging Prize, and has developed a family of flexible, scalable robotic explorers that are capable of reaching the Moon and elsewhere in the Solar System from Earth orbit. The team’s MX spacecraft comes in different versions, from delivery of scientific and commercial payloads to the Moon at low cost using a rideshare model to an autonomous mining Unmanned space vehicles | Insight Unmanned Systems Technology | October/November 2017 The ECA Moon rover developed by Team Indus for Google’s Lunar X competition weighs less than 25 kg (Courtesy of Team Indus) The MX9-3 will travel to the Moon to collect samples of rock, returning the samples in an MX3 craft (Courtesy of Moon Express)