Laurentian Lunars named finalists in Over the Dusty Moon challenge

A group of Laurentian University students in Sudbury, Ont., are finalists in a competition organized by the Colorado School of Mines.

The Over the Dusty Moon challenge involved teams to design and build a "regolith transport solution for the moon." In other words, they want students to find a way to move moon rocks.

"Lunar regolith is an important feedstock for construction, mineral processing and other ISRU (in-situ resource utilization) activities," the university stated.

"To help us learn how to work with this difficult material in the harsh lunar environment, Colorado School of Mines and Lockheed Martin invite university teams from around the world to compete."

The idea caught the attention of Quade Howald, the captain of the Laurentian Lunars and a fourth-year engineering student. His team includes eight mechanical engineering students in their final undergraduate education, including Alexander Mackenze, Adam Ferro, Ethan Murphy, Goran Henwick, Kevin Sullivan, Kyle Wooley and Reid Ludgate.

"The most readily available material is lunar regolith. And some describe it to have the consistency of wet sand and regolith can be processed to produce oxygen and raw materials for 3D printing," he said. 

"So some of the issues surrounding regolith, excavation and short distance transportation have already been solved in previous competitions, which created a strong need for long distance, horizontal and short distance vertical, high volume transportation." 

Howald said the team designed a "portable screw conveyor."

"It's a series of short screw conveyors that can be wheeled into place and they feed into one another, followed by a vertical section that drops off the list for processing."

Howald said there many challenges in developing the equipment. To start, the temperature, as the moon, has an average temperature of about minus 150 degrees.

He said the reduced gravity is also a challenge.

"It's nearly a perfect vacuum, and this regolith is very, very dusty. So because there's no atmosphere on the moon, you never had the chance to erode," he said.

"So they're very sharp, jagged particles. They're like electrostatic charges, so they stick to everything. So we have to prevent dust from getting caught in components so everything has to be shielded." 

Six teams, including the Laurentian Lunars, have been named finalists in Phase 1 of the contest.