Lunar Rovers Could be Dropped Into Lava Tubes to Explore Their Depths

Some areas of the moon are so remote that engineers need to build a special vehicle to visit them.

The lunar caves have been untouched for millions of years and are a relatively consistent temperature.

We still don't know a lot about these caves, so the best way to use them is to send some robots.

Lucas was a graduate student at EPFL and had an internship with the JAXA, the Japanese space agency responsible for designing the robots.

One disadvantage of video conferences is that they don't allow you to look at physical things that are important to your work.

He went out and bought some gym balls to test his new design, which was supposed to propel three of six robots far away from the landing spot of the exoskeleton.

He would have to drop his device 20 m to the Earth's surface to make a simulation of a 100 m drop into a lunar cave. He was struck by an innovative thought on a walk, but that is still a significant height.

The manager of the construction site allowed him to use one of the site's scaffolds to test his device. It didn't work the first, second, or hundredth time, as with most innovative projects, but it did eventually work and he provided his JAXA colleagues with a thoroughly tested exoskeleton that would propel three spherical robots a few meters.

Even though the task has been accomplished, there is still more to be done.

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Launching robots into lunar caves.

There is a mission to explore caves on the moon.

There is one idea for a lunar lava tube explorer.

There are lava tubes on the Moon and Mars. It's big enough to fit an entire planetary Bas.