Project Artemis involves sending the first woman and next man to the Moon's southern polar region by the wear 2024. To ensure the success of the mission, NASA is working on a lunar rover that will search and map for water/ice deposits that lies within the cold spots in meteor craters. This rover will use a drill to take various dirt samples, mapping the water resources within the South Pole-Aitken Basin. This establishes a map for possible human settlements in the future, providing fuel, water, and other resources.
Engineers first have to find a suitable area for the VIPER rover to take samples. To do this, NASA scientists use other spacecrafts to examine craters that have no direct access to sunlight. This allows the water to freeze due to the lack of the sun's heat and be preserved within the lunar landscape. The next step requires the development of the drill and tools that take samples of the moon's soil and ice to determine how different light and temperature conditions lead to different soil environments. The mechanics and final launch of the rover will be decided after the core instruments are build, and engineers will find out a way to move the rover from Earth to the Moon.
The invention of VIPER and the development of Artemis will help our understanding of the lunar landscape while providing us an understanding of suitable settlements for the future. The settlement of the moon will provide us with undiscovered land with mineral rich resources that can be transported back to Earth. Furthermore VIPER's discovery of water rich areas will help us establish these settlements, while providing important information about the lunar landscape for years to come.
This article shows the process of creating a project, and relates to the JPL project that we are creating. The first step is mapping out designs and optimal ways to shoot a ping pong ball into a container. After initial design, we create the actual structure of the trebuchet based of the main mechanic of the firing arm. The additional structure, the pipe, acts as a addition to the core trebuchet design, allowing the initial velocity of the ping pong ball to travel into the jar in an accurate manner.
Our team is working together to create the physical trebuchet design and approaching the final design stages. Currently we are building the frame of the trebuchet and arm wheel, we are also finishing the base that the trebuchet lies on. Our next step is the firing arm, finding the optimal launch angle while calculating the final velocity of the ball as it launches into the air. Since we are following our schedule that we have created, I believe that our team is being successful.
https://www.universetoday.com/143877/nasa-is-testing-a-rover-that-could-search-for-water-ice-on-the-moon/