• Hodgkinson, Jane H.
• Hargrave, Chad
• James, Craig

Abstract

Developing equipment designed to traverse, collect, and transport resources on the Moon requires an understanding ahead of time of how equipment will interact with regolith and what changes there will be in regolith topography. Replicating the exact physical lunar environment under Earth conditions is not possible and requires the use of simplified analogue testing facilities, supported by computer simulations that model more complete lunar conditions. While simulations have become increasingly sophisticated, they cannot be used to test and validate physical equipment that has been constructed.CSIRO has developed a new lunar resource testing facility at the Queensland Centre for Advanced Technology located in Pullenvale, Brisbane.This installation is set amongst other facilities used for the study of terrestrial mineral resources including laboratory- to pilot plant- scale characterisation, sorting, comminution, processing, and production plants.This testing facility provides a number of analogues for testing robotic and autonomous equipment that will be designed to explore and characterise resources on the moon, including a 4m x 3m reconfigurable testbed with simulated lunar regolith. This paper will describe a new facility added to the testbed to provide an extended Reality Interface (XRI) that scans the 3D surface and overlays the physical analogue with a digital spatial projection, and how the XRI will be used to enhance experiments in surface and sub-surface lunar exploration.

Topics

• impedance spectroscopy
• mineral
• surface
• experiment
• simulation