Rover with Canadian-made drill to test lunar mining prospects

U.S. roboticists have begun work on a lunar rover tough enough to drill through rock in the harsh conditions of the dark side of the moon.

Researchers at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University announced Thursday the rover called Scarab won't actually make the trip to the moon, but will allow NASA to test the requirements needed for a lunar rover capable of drilling into lunar soil and rock.

The Northern Centre For Advanced Technology Inc. (NORCAT) in Sudbury, Ont., will be building the drill for the rover, the Pittsburgh-based university said in a statement. The drill will be capable of processing and analyzing the geologic cores it obtains.

NORCAT has been working with Val Caron, Ont.-based Electric Vehicle Controllers Ltd. (EVC) on CanaDrill, a lightweight autonomous electric drill designed to work in space exploration projects.

The rover itself will have to be lightweight enough to operate with minimal power requirements but heavy enough to support the drilling operation, said William Whittaker, principal investigator of the NASA-funded project, in a statement. The environmental conditions will also be particularly harsh, he said.

"A lunar prospector will face a hostile environment in the perpetual darkness of craters at the moons southern pole, where ground temperatures are minus 385 degrees and no energy source is at hand," he said.

"Its a place where humans cant work effectively, but where Scarab will thrive, even while operating on the electrical power required to illuminate a 100-watt light bulb."

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.

Internet search company Google Inc. also announced earlier this month a competition called the Google Lunar X-Prize with a $20-million US top prize to the first private group that can land a rover on the moon and have it perform a series of tasks by the year 2012.

Also Thursday, Carnegie Mellon's Whittaker announced he would be assembling a team to compete in the Google-funded competition. That effort would be separate and distinct from the Scarab project.