A robot rover designed to find water and equipped with a Canadian-made drill is one of two concept vehicles NASA to be demonstrated at an annual space exploration conference this week.

The rover, dubbed Scarab, was built by researchers at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh but includes contributions from two Canadian companies known for their work in space robotics.

While the rover won't actually make the trip to the moon, NASA hopes it will allow them to test the requirements needed for a rover capable of drilling into lunar soil and rock.

It's a challenge to build a lunar rover capable of drilling into the hard lunar rock, called regolith, because the rover needs to be light enough to run on little power but heavy enough to support drilling.

The drill, designed to prospect as deep as one metre into the regolith was built by Northern Centre For Advanced Technology Inc. (NORCAT) in Sudbury, Ont., a lightweight autonomous electric drill designed to work in space exploration projects.
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Shame it ain't going there. I'd love to see some great high quality pictures from the lunar surface.

Well, something will go there like this, some day.
But this prototype says nothing about cameras. It's designed to test the feasibility of a drilling vehicle.

Besides, we already have thousands of high quality pictures from the lunar surface...to wit:

AS17-146-22315





Hasselblad 70mm, 60mm focal length, December 1972 at Taurus-Littrow, Kodak SO-368 color film.
We can even get closer if you like!

Very technological invention that is, I wonder how it will resist the harsh conditions of the lunar surface.


P.S. Thank you for the pic MID, it's amazing how much we have succeeded on lunar exploration projects.

You're welcome, Alex.
Just one of thousands of them taken by men while standing there on the Moon!