Working out of a hotel room in Italy, astronaut Thomas Reiter commanded a four-wheeled robot to pick up rocks from the surface of an active volcano on the east coast of Sicily, and he did so while behaving as if he was in orbit. around the moon.
The four-day simulation is part of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) preparations for a future mission to the moon, in which it plans to land a rover on the lunar surface to collect rock samples. The craft, part of the upcoming Artemis missions, will be directed by a team on Earth and an astronaut on board. Moon GateA planned space station orbiting the moon.
Although not quite the Moon, the volcanic surface of Mount Etna served as a counterpart to the lunar surface. Adapted to the rugged slopes of the volcano, the four-wheeled, two-arm Interact rover explored the rugged terrain with two lightweight rovers 1 and 2 from the German Space Agency. In addition, a fixed lunar lander provided Wi-Fi and power to the rover, a drone mapped the surface, and a centipede-like crawler called Scout served as a relay between the interactive probe and landing. Scouting was introduced by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
Within four days, ESA astronaut Reiter ordered the rover to pick up the rocks using controls placed in a hotel room in Sicily. The Interact rover was directed by controllers in the rover’s control room, which was set up in a separate hotel room, where the controllers and the astronaut would be physically separated during an actual mission.
The rover was about 14 miles (23 kilometers) from the hotel and about 8,500 feet (2,600 meters) up Mount Etna. To make the exercise more realistic, the team added a one-second signal delay to the control system to simulate the time it would take for commands from the Moon Gate to reach the lunar surface. Reiter was able to sense what the rover’s clutch felt from the remote control as the rover picked up rocks from the volcano – an added dimension of the European Space Agency’s sampling process.
“We have learned a lot more about the cooperation between ground control on Earth and the crew at the space station orbiting the moon, both of whom are operating a vehicle on the surface – this ‘joint’ operation is more efficient – than either side doing so,” Reiter said. a report.
The system, which has been in development for more than a decade, started as a joystick and could be controlled by an astronaut while in orbit, the European Space Agency said. The four-day simulation meant that the Interact rover was tested during a dummy outdoor setup. At the end of four days, the rover successfully returned rock samples to the lunar lander. The three vehicles worked together to create an array of antennas on a simulated lunar surface to simulate a radio astronomy station on the moon. Interestingly, these antennas were actually able to pick up a radio burst from Jupiter – the result of the passage of the volcanic moon Io through the planet’s magnetic field.
At the end of the simulation, the European Space Agency found that the rover’s controls would be too challenging for astronauts to enter the Moon in the future.
“What we quickly discovered is that continuous remote monitoring is very demanding for the astronaut operator, so we added stress-reducing features equivalent to assistive driving that modern cars provide,” said Thomas Krueger, ESA human chief. Robot Interaction Laboratory, said in a statement. “For example, the operator points to a location and the rover decides on its own how to get there safely. Its neural network is programmed to identify rocks of scientific value for itself.
It seems very easy and certainly very appropriate for the future age of Artemis. The European Space Agency hopes to have the rover and the control system in real working order by the end of this decade.
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