Soil Simulant? You mean they'll be using fake dirt? What could possibly be cheaper than dirt?

It looks like they want one of those Terran SCV's from "Starcraft".

It's not that it's simulating dirt. It's simulating lunar regolith. MOON DIRT. The production of it was also the subject research and development. There was a workshop on it in January. http://est.msfc.nasa.gov/workshops/lrsm2005.html

When I looked yesterday, there seemed to be precious little in the way of actual detail for the competition, but they were clear about the dirt. It's as fine as talcum powder, but heavily compacted.

Compacted talcum powder, huh?

In that case, I'd think along the lines of a motorized needle or jackhammer to powderize it, then I could suck it up with a vacuum clean..ah...er...

Oh yeah, MOON. Nevermind...

I could leave the glass sleeves off of the thermionic devices I'd use for the electronics, though.

I really hate a lot of people. Particularly smart-asses on Slashdot who think that they are sooooo clever and could solve any problem in the world if they could be bothered. There are several posts over there that do suggest using roombas or whatever. Or that say "um SHOVEL!" as if having a guy in a spacesuit is anywhere near as sustainable over a period of months. Unless you have a spacesuit that regenerates air using solar power or something.

The joy of the competition idea is that anyone* who thinks they know best can just knock up their idea and show the rest of us what idiots we are. Grrr. Posts that start "It's obvious to me that....."

Same was true with robot wars. Backseat roboticists. Grrrrr X 2

*anyone American that is. Grrrr X 3!

I hope you don't think that I was being mean in my above post! Everyone round here appreciates the problems and advantages of robots. (Plus the need for air to operate vacuum cleaners).

Furthermore, I quite like your needle-driver approach. The trouble is though, that without the full competition specs, including the soil, we are all a bit in the dark I guess. Other than we assume that they're more interested in the collected regolith than the shape of the hole...

We're all friends here.

My two posts were indeed meant to be more humorous than informative, though.

I've now been thinking seriously about the problem - how to collect what may be a powdery or chalky substance in a reduced-gravity, zero atmosphere environment, where dead reckoning and odometry may be compromised due to the roughness of the terrain. As of this time, we have no Moon GPS, (MPS?) either. And I'm thinking there would be more than one of these moon-miners working at once.

I'll sign off with a Slashdot cliche: "I welcome our new moon dirt gathering robotic overlords"

:-)

The thing that's interesting is that the moon environment is not what/where the contest will be testing in but rather in California. I'm sure that considering whether the robot would actually work in such an environment would be a consideration, tho. So if you don't have gravity and you don't have air (for suction), I guess you're design would have to rely heavily on how to push/sling the dirt around?

Dogsbody - I for one was laughing; and I agree - we are all good friends here.

I think I need a sample of this "Synthetic Moon Dirt" (SMD) to determine what kind of digger needs to be on the robot.

I saw a news item last night on what steps NASA was taking to protect their real moon rocks from huricane Rita. Apparently they store a lot of them at the Houston facility.

Yeah, I didn't think anyone would really take offense, bu I didn't want y'all to think I was being mean ;)

Oh it turns out that the moon might have an atmosphere, depending on your definition. The rocks give off gas, but most of it does escape. Even so, it's a bit like there being some alcohol in alcohol-free beer IYSWIM...

Anyhoo, while I think that the solutions developed on Earth will work on the moon, it does seem unlikely that they will be able to exploit the lunar circumstances, like the pressure and gravity.

So what we need is a real lunar laboratory!