A private company was funded by the US Government to begin construction of the first "streetlights" on the Moon - towering structures that can withstand the harsh conditions there.
The moon is targeted to become humanity's first extraterrestrial construction site, with plans for permanent settlements, spacecraft systems and nuclear reactors. But before those things happen, the Moon needs light.
Daytime on the Moon lasts the equivalent of two weeks on Earth, and so does nighttime. These long, dark nights were disastrous for the Moon landings, which relied on sunlight for energy and posed a major threat to explorers.
Space technology company Honeybee Robotics (part of Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin) has proposed a solution: giant street lights that function as solar cells .
It may sound far-fetched, but the project — called “Lunar Utility Navigation Using Advanced Remote Sensing and Energy-Distributed Autonomous Beamforming,” or LUNARSABER — is one of many projects being launched by the Agency. The US government-funded Defense Advanced Research Project (DARPA) is launching the next era of lunar exploration.
A recent promotional video posted to YouTube shows that the technology is clearly making progress. As the project's principal investigator, Vishnu Sanigepalli, explains in the video, each LUNARSABER lamp will be much taller than regular street lamps - in fact, at 100 meters tall, they will be taller. including the Goddess of Liberty .
These giant lampposts are designed to store solar energy during the day and then illuminate the surrounding area with powerful floodlights during the following two-week nights.
The height of the light is important, Sanigepalli explains, not only for peering over the rims of giant craters on the moon, but also for lifting scientific equipment weighing up to 0.9 tons such as cameras and communications equipment. to higher positions.
Meanwhile, the base of each tower will be equipped with a power adapter to help recharge the lunar rover or other nearby hypothetical lunar infrastructure. If LUNARSABER lights could be deployed to different parts of the Moon's surface, Sanigepalli said, this streetlight network could serve as the Moon's first power grid.
Of course, building such giant structures on the Moon poses many challenges. The project is still in the early stages of development on Earth, but it is one of the initiatives selected by DARPA for the 10-year Lunar Architecture Capability Study (LunA-10) that the agency has launched. declared last year.
