Moon Tower Could Provide Astronauts With Light, Power, Guidance
The technology for NASA’s Artemis mission is coming fast and furious, because there are many problems to solve before we can establish a permanent human presence on the moon. A pioneering idea from Honeybee Robotics, one of the most well-known space technology companies now owned by Blue Origin, could solve many of them with a single piece of infrastructure. The Lunar Utility Navigation with Advanced Remote Sensing and Autonomous Beaming for Energy Redistribution, or LUNARSABER (as someone who really likes Star Wars might call it), is a 100-meter-tall pole that could hold a ton of equipment. It could serve as the central hub for power, communications, and lighting for the Artemis base, and part of a mesh network of other points of interest on the lunar surface.
Let’s start with the technology that powers LUNARSABER itself. No rocket could support a 100-meter tower and land it on the moon, and building such a tower on the lunar surface without some existing infrastructure would also be nearly impossible. So Honeybee will use another existing technology, the Deployable Interlocking Actuated Bands for Linear Operations system, or DIABLO (maybe someone at Honeybee also likes Blizzard Entertainment games).
DIABLO takes a piece of metal and bends it into a deployable cylindrical structure that supports a heavy payload. In this case, that structure serves as the basis for the LUNARSABER. But the real deal is the capabilities it can provide. Let's look at the sides first.
With energy at such a premium on the Moon, it seems obvious that placing solar panels on the sides would be most useful, and that’s exactly what Honeybee is doing. In a recently released video, they show off two types of solar panel placement. One looks like a yo-yo extended from the top of the LUNARSABER tower’s payload holder. This technique completely encloses the metal structure underneath, but allows access to the Sun from any angle. Alternatively, the top of the 100-meter tower could deploy booms carrying traditional solar panels and track where the Sun is during its 14-day journey across the lunar sky.
Honeybee engineers estimate that this technology will be able to produce about 100 kW of power, but it has other advantages as well. Some areas of the lunar poles are always illuminated — or almost always. In these areas, the tall pole will capture at least some sunlight nearly 95% of the time. Of course, the sunlight will only hit the top of LUNARSABER, which will significantly reduce its overall power output. However, having some power on a cold lunar night is certainly better than having none and relying on batteries for survival.
However, power delivery is only one part of LUNARSABER's work. It has four other main capabilities:
It can transfer energy to other devices.
It can track other devices.
It can communicate with a wide range of devices.
It can provide light for these devices.
Let's get the first one out of the way. Beam-based power transmission is a hot topic in the space technology community, thanks in part to recent successful tests by Caltech and the US Naval Research Laboratory. This technology could be used on LUNARSABER. If one mast is bathed in sunlight and the other is in the shade, the mast with excess power could beam power to the one that needs it. This power transfer could also be done between LUNARSABER and individual objects, such as rovers or astronauts in spacesuits. If power needs to be replenished, a 100-metre tower with a power teleportation system on top could provide power over a large area very efficiently.
However, in order to effectively transmit power to these objects, LUNARSABER needs to know where they are. This is where the second technology comes in. Using a series of sensors, it can find and track various objects around the LUNARSABER tower. Anything within line of sight can be tracked and powered directly by the tower itself.
Line of sight is also useful for a later use case, but it is not necessary. LUNARSABER could serve as a sort of lunar cell tower, providing wireless communication between objects on its network. This prototype internet would allow different rovers to coordinate their actions, or an astronaut in one part of the base to issue commands to rovers in another part.
Finally, to give these commands, it would be useful for astronauts to be able to see where they are going. This would also be useful for rovers, since many of their scientific missions would otherwise have to wait out two weeks of lunar darkness. Spotlights on top of LUNARSABER could provide visible light to astronauts and rovers, allowing them to carry out their activities effectively whether it is lunar night or not.
Another aspect of LUNARSABER that leverages several of the different applications mentioned above is the linking of multiple towers into a line-of-sight grid, allowing communications and power to be transmitted literally from the other side of the Moon. This would solve two major problems that have plagued lunar explorers: providing constant solar power and constant communication with Earth.
Since at least half of the Moon is always illuminated, if engineers strategically place LUNARSABERs around the Moon's surface, at least one of them will always be illuminated. This solar tower can wirelessly transmit power to another tower within its line of sight. This process can continue until the power is transmitted back to the main Artemis base, providing power even in the cold lunar darkness.
Research on the other side of the Moon is also difficult, since the scientific field is limited to the side directly facing us. However, a strategically placed grid of several LUNARSABERs will allow communication with Earth even when exploring the “dark” side of the Moon facing us.
As Vishnu Sanjipalli, LUNARSABER project manager, said in a recent video, “The best way to describe LUNARSABER is to say it’s a Swiss Army knife.” These multi-purpose tools have been in explorers’ pockets for decades, and LUNARSABER helps combine their versatility and flexibility with the challenges facing new lunar explorers.
