Sure, we’ve heard a lot about the plans to check out Mars (and beyond) lately, but if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably heard a lot about space agencies staying closer to home.
As in, the space agencies in the world all have their sights set on returning men to the Moon – and soon.
So, maybe it makes sense that they would need a big streetlight to be able to see what they’re doing.
The minds behind it are at Honeybee Robotics, which joined Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin two years ago. Their concept is a 330-foot pole that would illuminate a future base on the Moon’s surface.
The project, dubbed Lunar Utility Navigation with Advanced Remote Sensing and Autonomous Beaming for Energy Redistribution (LUNARSABER), would contain a ton of scientific equipment at the top as well as distribute power.
In the future, it might even be part of a network of poles just like it.
The concept was awarded funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of its Ten-year Lunar Architecture Capability Study (LunA-10).
“It would make power, communications, lighting very accessible to all payloads that are sitting on the surface,” says Honeybee investigator Vishnu Sanigepalli.
No existing rocket would be large enough to deliver the pole in one piece, so as a first step, they’ve imagined a Deployable Interlocking Actuated Bands for Linear Operations system, which can bend a rolled piece of metal into cylindrical structures.
Night on the Moon stretches for two weeks on Earth, so floodlights would certainly be helpful.
They believe they could also generate power via solar panels when the Sun is up. It’s tall enough to capture sunlight for longer hours and they estimate that it could produce around 100 kilowatts of power.
“If we have the ability to build really tall structures near the south poles, we can essentially ensure that there is greater than 95 percent illumination throughout the lunar year. This depends on the location and the height.”
Honeybee also posits the tower could be used to beam power wirelessly to structures in its line of sight, or even to provide a wireless communication network on a future lunar base.
Basically, they believe the device is very versatile and adaptable, and could have many different applications once on the lunar surface.
Only time will tell.
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