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Our team comes from a small town Sopron, Hungary. We are 16-17 years old, all of us are interested in IT, math and science so in the future we want to become engineers and programmers.
In our school – Széchenyi István Grammar School – there is a robotics course where students can build and program their own robots from LEGO MINDSTORMS kits.
Our chosen topic is No.2: Spaceship – global cooperation.
Our goal is to create a global space program where several nations can cooperate and work on expanding our knowledge on the Lunar environment,
establishing a permanent base there and making Moon the center of human space research.
Why is the moon so intresting for humanity?
This is the closest celestial body to us and it’s geologically very similar to Earth, and of course the only celestial body, where humanity set foot - so far.
During the space-race of the sixty’s and seventy’s both the American and Soviet space agencies had a lot of missions to get to know the Moon better,
and after 2000 ESA, the Chinese, the Japanese and the Indian space program has joined them.
Throughout these, they collected samples and gathered a lot of experience about the geology and surface of the Moon.
During the almost 60 years old, spacecraft-supported Lunar Science a lot of instruments stayed on the Moon.
These instruments are decaying, because they were not planned for long-time space exposure.
It would be fantastic to analyze these, because they can give us a lot of information about the long-time effect of the Lunar environment.
The atmosphere of the Moon is so tenuous it’s almost vacuum.
Because of this the differences in temperature can be several hundred °C – even in a few meters –
and there is almost no protection against the cosmic radiation - and of course micrometeorites pose a huge threat to the spacecrafts.
The surface itself is also very rough.
It is covered with lunar soil – also called moondust – which is a very small grain-sized, electrostatic material, sticking everywhere.
If we could study these items the extracted data would be priceless for the designers and engineers of the first human base on the Moon.
Researches would be easier with autonomous robots and drones – basically Lunar rovers.
But because of the 1/6th Earth gravitation the navigation of a high-speed vehicle is also very difficult.
They could collect rock samples, make measurements to choose the ideal place for the Lunar base.
First we leave the base protecting our rover to cross a high ridge splitting our sample area in half.
We simulate this with a LEGO rover that discovers and analyses some required materials.
This robot was built for this type of terrain, navigates with distance-measuring sensors, uses a solar panel to charge its batteries and uses several different robotic arms.
At first we take a sample of the Lunar soil and analyze it’s chemical composition, we found silicon-dioxide.
We are planning for a long mission so the next step is to find an area where we can hibernate the rover and wake it up after the 14 day long Lunar night.
This is the high ridge that we’ve seen before – there are the least shadows and our rover can operate longer.
We are discovering some titanium near an impact crater.
Silicon collected from the moondust can be made to produce circuits, solar panels or glass - and maybe some collected titanium can be used as a building material.
Our next job is to find He-3 which is also in the Lunar soil. Later we find some water ice in the moondust.
The mining of these elements may be not cost-efficient, but some experimental products can be made out of them to test their capabilities.
From here we are heading to the Apollo landing sites.
Our goal is to acquire the 50 years old camera of the Lunar rover buggy (which vehicle was designed by the Hungarian Ferenc Pavlics)
so we can analyze the effects of the Lunar environment on the optics, metal cover and electronics.
With the application of the material found on the surface – and with additional ones transported from Earth –
we would like to build a research centre, where the inhabitants of a permanent colony could do the research.
Most of the buildings will be partially underground – thus avoiding some of the harsh effects of the environment.
The middle segment of the base is for inhabitants.
There will be the living quarters, social areas, storerooms, laboratories, a small hospital and the offices.
The purpose of outer buildings is special.
There will be a fusion power plant using the gathered He-3 molecules which would produce the energy needed for the base – of course equipped with auxiliary solar panels.
We would use the energy for the electrolysis of the H2O (which will be transported from Earth or from another base near the southern Lunar pole)
to create O2 for breathing and to create H2O2 (hydrogen peroxide) as rocket propellant.
There will be a launching pad for future Mars or other Solar System missions
– due to the lower gravity of the Moon, rockets are more easily launched from here than from Earth.
We are also building a greenhouse where we would grow some plants resistant to low gravity to produce food and more oxygen.
After the initial settling down we would raise a new building for constructing different spacecrafts which we could test right away in space.
They will be- for example -space probes sent to distant moons or planets – mainly landers or rovers – similar to the ones we built.
Our first lander will be sent to Mars. After the touchdown the legs are opening, stabilizing the probe on the ground.
The first task is to connect to one of the orbiters around the planet and open the lid of the camera.
After that the probe maps it's surroundings and starts the scientific measurements.
It will also measure the properties of the atmosphere and of the soil. It will heat a rock on the surface with a LASER and will analyze the produced gases.
Of course every experiment is made at least twice, but we can do all the measurements multiple times .
There is a solar panel on the probe for the long lifespan.
These may be just the plans today, but with global cooperation they can become the reality of tomorrow.