The barren lunar landscape has some important resources, such as water and minerals like iron and titanium, but extracting and processing them will require special equipment. Where those resources can be found will dictate where to land and how to mine them. To help with that, Lunar Station Corp. is using a wealth of NASA data in multiple computer models.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith 60 years of lunar data available to us, we help our clients understand the environmental factors for any given location on the Moon,\u201d said Blair DeWitt, CEO of Lunar Station. Combining disparate data from different sensors used by NASA and other space agencies is a critical first step. One NASA resource the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company used to build terrain maps is the Ames Stereo Pipeline. The open-source code automatically processes images captured from satellites, robotic rovers, historical images, and more to create a 3D model revealing features such as rock placement and elevation.<\/p>\n
But the availability of in-situ lunar water resources at any location is largely unknown, according to Gerry Sanders, in-situ resource utilization system capability lead at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston. To begin to fill that gap, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite was designed to crash its uppers stage into the Moon\u2019s South Pole in 2009. The examination of the resulting plume revealed the presence of water ice.<\/p>\n
Lunar Station is building on that work and more to help commercial space companies with mission planning, which includes scientific research for mining operations. The MoonHacker program uses proprietary geospatial analytics platform and advanced algorithms to fuse all the lunar data in NASA\u2019s Planetary Data System to help identify indicators for shallow pits of lunar water.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can find sites for landing pads, for cultivating the best paths for roving, and inform our clients about communications. If you can\u2019t see Earth at a given location like in the polar regions or the far side of the Moon, you have to come up with a relay strategy,\u201d said DeWitt. \u201cWe can do this in part thanks to NASA data.\u201d<\/p>\n
In MoonHacker\u2019s Radiation Simulator, an electronic version of a company\u2019s rover or satellite, called a digital twin, can be subjected to the radiation en route or at the mission site to determine the protection required.<\/p>\n