Part 8 of 12 Parts
Sixteen research projects drawn from NASA, the space industry and academia will receive grants from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program in order to study the feasibility of their concepts. Here are more of the projects:
12. FLOAT -- Flexible Levitation on a Track
Ethan Schaler
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
This project is dedicated to the construction of the first lunar railway system which will provide reliable, autonomous, and efficient package transport on the Moon. A durable, long-live robotic transport system will be very important to the daily operations of a sustainable lunar base in the 2030s. Such a base is envisioned in NASA’s Moon to Mars plan and mission concepts like the Robotic Lunar Surface Operations 2 (RLSO2) in order to transport regolith mined for in situ resource utilization consumables such as H2O, LOX, and LH2 or for construction and transporting payloads around the lunar base to and from landing zones or other outposts.
In order to accomplish these goals, the NASA JPL team proposes to develop Flexible Levitation on a Track (FLOAT) to meet these transportation needs.
The FLOAT system utilizes unpowered magnetic robots that levitate above a three-layer flexible film track. A graphite layer enables the robots to passively float over tracks using diamagnetic levitation. A flex-circuit layer generates electromagnetic thrust to controllably propel robots along the tracks. An optional thin-film solar panel layer generates power for the base when it is in sunlight during the two-week lunar day. The FLOAT robots have no moving parts, and they levitate over the track to minimize lunar dust abrasion which are damaging to lunar robots with wheels, legs or tracks.
FLOAT tracks unroll directly onto the surface of the lunar regolith removing the need for major on-site construction which is required for conventional roads, railways or cableways. Individual FLOAT robots will be able to carry loads of various sizes up to seventy pounds per square yard at speeds of up to sixty miles an hour. A big FLOAT system will be able to move up to hundreds of thousands of pounds of regolith or cargo multiple miles per day while consuming less than forty kilowatts of power. FLOAT robots will operate autonomously in the dusty, inhospitable lunar environment with minimal site preparation. Its network of tracks can be rolled up and reconfigured over time to match the changing requirements of lunar base missions.
In Phase 1, the team will establish the fundamental feasibility of designing a FLOAT system with robots a yard long operating over miles of track to support human exploration activities on the Moon, by accomplishing the following four major tasks:
1) Define mission requirements such as payload mass/size/quantity, transport distance, power requirements and more from NASA lunar base studies.
2) Create simulations of FLOAT systems with robots a yard long operating over miles of track in lunar conditions to refine performance estimates.
3) Perform experiments on existing inch-scale, FLOAT-like robots to study the most pressing questions about FLOAT system feasibility.
4) Select appropriate size for FLOAT system to match mission requirements using predicted lunar performance from simulations and experiments.