The mission to find water on the moon has eyes in Edmonton
"It's designed to detect water ice by looking for a signature of hydrogen."
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Ice isn’t generally a welcome sight for vehicles on the road, but a mission to put one on the moon is counting on it.
Canada plans to launch its first rover as early as 2026. The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) describes the project as an opportunity to develop technologies for deep-space missions, and find a valuable resource to help make those happen.
Chris Herd, a geochemistry expert and professor at the University of Alberta, told Postmedia he’s part of a science team working on the mission and involved in the search for water that may be trapped in the moon’s darker regions.
Herd said he’s working with Ontario company Bubble Technology Industries to help set the parameters for a specialized tool in the hunt — a Lunar Hydrogen Autonomous Neutron Spectrometer (LHANS).
“It’s designed to detect water ice by looking for a signature of hydrogen,” one of the underlying elements of water, Herd said.
The device is one of six scientific payloads the rover will carry to the moon’s south pole to explore permanently shadowed regions that can reach temperatures colder than -200 C.
A successful search would support the creation of a lunar base to aid future expeditions to Mars. Tapping moon water would help sustain human life, provide a source of hydrogen to fuel rocket launches from the surface and bypass the need to ship water from Earth — an otherwise expensive and complicated endeavour, CSA said.
Herd said the LHANS can also detect other elements on the periodic table, such as iron and calcium, and he’ll be on hand to interpret the device’s findings once the rover starts rolling.
To do that, the vehicle will first need to survive a hostile lunar landscape.
In November, Ottawa awarded a contract to Canadensys Aerospace, headquartered in Bolton, Ont., to design and build the rover.
President and CEO Christian Sallaberger told Postmedia the machine will face not just extreme cold, but also boiling hot temperatures during the day and cosmic radiation that threaten to damage electronics.
“If it gets stuck or it falls off, you can’t go and fix it,” Sallaberger said. “So the whole system has to be designed to be very robust.”
The company has been developing lunar technologies for the past decade, Sallaberger said, and while the machine will have some autonomous capability, lighting on the moon will make it difficult for operators on Earth to tell the difference between a shadow and a crater, especially with a long-distance delay in communications.
Even the moon’s microscopically jagged dirt, with a consistency that resembles Portland cement powder, can gum up a rover’s mechanisms, he added.
Resembling a 50-square-centimetre pyramid with the top lopped off, the four-wheeled, remote-controlled, solar-paneled machine is due to weigh in at about 30 kilograms with its payloads and reach a maximum speed of 0.72 km/h (or 20 cm/s), CSA said.
More than just a search for water, the mission also aims to demonstrate key technologies for further lunar exploration, Herd said. But when it comes to working with rovers, this isn’t his first rodeo.
As a team member on NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover, Herd said he sees rover operations on a daily basis with that mission — experience that will come to bear on this latest moon shot.
“If all goes well, we’ll be doing both,” he said.
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