NASA shows off rover armed with Canadian-made drill

A robot rover designed to find water and equipped with a Canadian-made drill is one of two concept vehicles NASA to be demonstrated at an annual space exploration conference this week.

The rover, dubbed Scarab, was built by researchers at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh but includes contributions from two Canadian companies known for their work in space robotics.

While the rover won't actually make the trip to the moon, NASA hopes it will allow them to test the requirements needed for a rover capable of drilling into lunar soil and rock.

It's a challenge to build a lunar rover capable of drilling into the hard lunar rock, called regolith, because the rover needs to be light enough to run on little power but heavy enough to support drilling.

"This is the first step toward understanding the potential for lunar resources and developing the knowledge needed to extract them economically," said NASA's Bill Larson, deputy manager of the In-Situ Resource Utilization project, in a statement.

The drill, designed to prospect as deep as one metre into the regolith was built by Northern Centre For Advanced Technology Inc. (NORCAT) in Sudbury, Ont., the private not-for-profit corporation behind work on the Canadrill, a lightweight autonomous electric drill designed to work in space exploration projects.

Ottawa-based Neptec, with funding from the Canadian Space Agency, contributed a camera that builds three-dimensional images of terrain using laser light, allowing the rover to select a site for drilling.

Neptec is best known for building the 3D laser camera attached to the end of a boom on the Canadarm, a sensor that NASA uses to inspect space shuttles for damage caused by foam coming offthe shuttle's external fuel tanks during liftoff.

Later in 2008 the project will be teamed with a separate experiment designed to add the ability to crush lunar samples and heat them in an effort to extract water.

The other test vehicle to be demonstrated at the Space Exploration Conference in Denver, which wraps up Thursday, Feb. 28, was a "lunar truck" called Chariot that NASA first showed off in October 2007. The 12-wheeled trailer has six-wheel drive with independent steering for each wheel, allowing it to move side to side in a crablike motion.

The United States, Russia and a number of other countries have launched ambitious plans to visit, explore and even establish bases on the moon, with several projects designed to scout the satellite for potential mineral resources.