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We Miss Pluto |
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HEX Lunar Rover
Our product is a Helium-3 Excavator (HEX) and lunar rover designed to extract Helium-3 from the lunar regolith, store it, and ready it for transport back to Earth.
Team Concept
Given a worldwide demand for Helium-3 by scientists, its scarcity on Earth, and its relative abundance on the moon, a lunar mining base will be created to harvest this He-3 on the moon and house astronauts at the same time. The base will utilize a large solar cell array in order to power its daylight functions as well as a battery array to power its functions during the fourteen day lunar nights. Since one lunar day is the equivalent of twenty eight days on Earth, the base will have to be able to handle extended periods of time without direct energy from sunlight. The process of extracting the regolith from the moon and the He-3 from the regolith is somewhat simple. To start, the lunar base will move in a pattern very similar to the well-known Archimedean Spiral. Then, the regolith will be filtered until only the smallest dust remains, allowing easy heating of the regolith and easy removal of gases. Once heated in the oven, the gases will be put into compressed storage containers for storage and eventually shipment/use. The cooked regolith will then be released from the base. After a period of time, and assuming the infrastructure exists to transport things to and from the moon, the He-3 will be returned to Earth to be sold for a profit. Over the period of a year, about ten tons of He-3 should be attainable; enough to power the US for a year, assuming a positive net gain can be gained from fusion reactors involving He-3. From the amount of He-3 which exists on the moon, about 1.1 million tons, in an ideal situation, the world’s energy problems can be solved for millennia to come.
Team Description
We are four students in a Physics II class in electricity and magnetism at New Horizons Governor's School for Science and Technology in Hampton, VA. Students attend Governor's School in the morning and different home high schools in the afternoon.
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Chase Brown
Joe Luke Tyler Clinch Drew Tyler Advisor Dr. David Moffatt |
New Horizons Governor's School
520 Butler Farm Road
Hampton
Virginia 23666
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Development Plan
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Overview of Plan:
The goal of the plan is to be able to plan a trip up to the University of Wisconsin at Madison and other symposia to get a feel for He-3 fusion research as well as to raise interest in our concept in order to create a prototype for presentation at fairs a
Total Cost of the Plan:
9000
Feedback
[Post Feedback]
tim welch
interesting concept
but acoording to your concept, under that section you state under "ideal situations" and assuming infrastructure works if im taking this is context correctly , my question is this: are you suggesting and orimplying that this might not work due to unforseen factors?
otherwise love the idea keep up the great work
Ken Howard
Very interesting concept. About how long do you expect the lunar base to stay in operation and how costly will maintenance be for the base? Good work guys!
Richard Purman
Nice video, guys! Wishing you the best
at this competition! But where are your
Virginia Tech shirts? :-)
Lena Cumberland
Great work! Wish all of you the best !
To everyone, thank you for your kind words and questions.
In response to the questions, we plan on responding to them in a number of ways. We're planning a series of videos to be posted to the site for everyone to see in which we can respond to the questions. Also, we might decide to answer some questions in our blog posts. We don't want to weigh the blog posts down with overly technical information though. We want to keep that as a simple portal for information on what we are doing at any given period of time and our goal for that week. Therefore, the video posts will be where you want to look for information regarding your questions. We have three more videos we know we are going to do comprising of background information on He-3, information on our concept and its design, and the economics involved with the projects. We have taped the first one and will have it uploaded once edited, but we plan on addressing the questions at the end of the coming videos on the concept design and economics.
Thank you again,
Team We Miss Pluto
Charlie Chan
Very interesting concept.
What will be done with the waste material(s) that have no cost-effective uses?
Jack Wayne
By assuming that there will be a means of transporting the He-3 containers back to earth, have you made an estimate of the cost in carrying out that task? Also, do you have a general idea for the transport method or will that be predetermined by someone else? Your work is quite interesting, good job!
James Scott
In your calculations, what sort of technology/costs do you assume? Current costs to put objects on the moon are rated in at least the hundreds of thousands of dollars, so while it might be reasonable to assume a reduction in those costs, it would seem that the whole enterprise is dependent on whether or not those costs are low enough. What, in your calculations, defines "low enough"?
Nancy Conrad
Good luck . Your video gives a good description of the project. We look forward to seeing you at NASA Ames.
Joshua Neubert
That is a great quote in your blog post. I haven't heard that one before. Glad to see you found such a fitting opener to your blog. There is much work to be done, but remember to always have fun with this as well.
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