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48 The Moon Closer to home, efforts to colonise the Moon and establish mining operations are continuing, despite the inability of any party to win the $30 million Google Lunar XPrize. This was aimed at inducing plans for designing, launching and operating lunar rovers, following which the UGVs would travel briefly around the Moon, transmitting video and imaging telemetry over a 500 m distance. The wheeled UGV designed by XPrize participant Team Hakuto is now being used by iSpace, a Japanese company developing the rover and a lander for lunar transport, orbit and mine development. The rover is expected to use various COTS components, with drills and manipulators to help with extracting resources, including water for establishing hydrogen fuel production facilities that will enable the return of manned missions. Both the rover and the lander to deploy it are being designed to be as small and lightweight as possible to minimise fuel requirements, with the former fitting within the latter’s 30 kg payload capacity. The company is planning to launch a mission in mid-2020 using a Falcon 9 rocket to orbit the Moon with the lander, before a second mission aimed at landing and deploying rovers to explore the lunar surface. The lander is due to be assembled, integrated with subsystems, and tested at a facility owned by Japan Airlines. This facility, the Japan Airlines Engine Maintenance Center, currently provides a 140 m working space for the lander’s development, with technical assistance in areas such as welding and quality management provided by Japan Airlines. Another Lunar XPrize participant, SpaceIL, is planning its own unmanned spacecraft mission to land on the Moon in February 2019. The 585 kg lander will use its main engine and thrusters to perform a ‘soft landing’ on its four carbon composite legs. Similarly to the Lunar XPrize rover requirements, it will transmit video and imagery back to Earth, as well as measure magnetic fields. The Israeli-built vehicle might then use its residual fuel to ‘hop’ the 500 m to survey the remaining area specified by the competition. Mars Among NASA’s various projects aimed at gaining a better understanding of the environment and composition of Mars, the Mars InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) probe is potentially the most complex. Launched atop an Atlas V-401 rocket in May, the craft’s lander is scheduled to touch down on the Martian surface this November. InSight consists of two other sections in addition to the lander. The largest of these, the cruise section, provides the outer enclosure and propulsion to see the mission from Earth to Mars’ orbit. Power is supplied by two solar arrays, and navigation information is gathered by a star scanner, a sun sensor and an IMU that checks the position and attitude of the craft against the positions of the Sun and stars to estimate InSight’s location and velocity. A suite of eight thrusters then work to adjust the direction and orientation of the cruise craft. The other section, the entry, descent and landing system (EDL), will detach from the cruise section before carrying October/November 2018 | Unmanned Systems Technology The InSight lander will deploy a range of sensors aimed at gathering data on the Martian geography and seismology (Courtesy of NASA) The Parker Solar Probe is designed with a range of sensors to ensure it is not accidentally damaged by heat from the Sun (Courtesy of NASA)