In the future, near future within a decade or two, mankind will begin to mine the moon and in doing so he will have to deal with that local environment and its unusual requirements. Requirements, which are much different than those here on Earth; one big problem will be the moon dust which will get on the robotic mining equipment and cause problems with potential eventualities such as motors over heating due to the moon dust getting into the cooling vents and moon dust corroding parts of the equipment. Specific considerations must be taken to prevent this. Here on Earth when cleaning heavy equipment it is very important to keep radiators cleaned otherwise the engines over heat and can cause unnecessary wear and even complete failure costing upwards of $35,000 in repairs. If we look at the current state of the art automated unmanned equipment in the truck sector for instance we see components we can use to help make robotic mining equipment cleaning machines for the moon. Here is a system by Belanger called the "V-Max" which could work. http://www.belangerinc.com/products/vmax.htm http://www.belangerinc.com/markets/truckbus.htm Now then of course we will need to use different high-tech materials to keep it light-weight, as the cost to send a steel structure to the Moon is too costly as is. But believe it or not my thoughts most recently have actually been to use this particular design for Lunar Colony mining equipment cleaning, due to the issues with Moon Dust. Although in my estimation the system would have to work on high-pressure gas and ionic charge to break the dust away from clinging to the side and then blow it away. We cannot use water, because it is a precious commodity on the Moon. Think on this in 2006. |
