NASA is testing a new robotic arm that really knows how to chill out

Future planetary missions might discover in extraordinarily chilly temperatures that stymie current spacecraft, due to a challenge beneath growth at JPL.

When NASA returns to the moon with Artemis, the company and its companions will attain unexplored areas of the lunar floor across the South Pole, the place it might get a lot colder at night time than even on frigid Mars. Such floor situations can be problem for present spacecraft, which depend on energy-consuming heaters to remain heat.

A know-how demonstration being developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California might supply an answer that may allow exploration in the course of the darkish of lunar night time, a interval that spans about 14 Earth days. The challenge, which lately underwent testing at JPL, is known as Chilly Operable Lunar Deployable Arm (COLDArm). It combines a number of new applied sciences to create a robotic arm system that may perform in temperatures as little as minus 280 levels Fahrenheit (minus 173 levels Celsius).

“Going to the moon, we’d like to have the ability to function throughout colder temperatures, significantly throughout lunar night time, with out the usage of heaters,” stated challenge principal investigator Ryan McCormick. “COLDArm would let missions proceed working and conducting science even in excessive cryogenic environments.”

To clarify the challenge, McCormick recollects a scene from the 1991 film “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” through which a hostile android made from liquid steel is stopped cold—actually frozen strong—by a large spill of liquid nitrogen. “The dangerous man cannot work in these temperatures, however COLDArm might,” McCormick stated.

Whereas COLDArm will not be working in liquid nitrogen, it might function on a lander despatched to a frozen ocean world like Jupiter’s moon Europa, the place its lack of heated components would have the additional advantage of permitting assortment of unstable supplies with out considerably affecting the temperature of samples. It might release some two hours of time and as much as 30% of a mission every day’s power funds that Mars rovers like Curiosity and Perseverance spend warming up their robotic arms so their gears do not stress and break within the chilly.

The 6-foot-6-inch (2-meter) arm is supplied with two commercially out there cameras for 3D mapping which have the identical imaging sensor that’s constructed into the 13-megapixel coloration digital camera utilized by NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter—one in every of a number of applied sciences COLDArm is adapting from the little rotorcraft. A wide range of attachments and small devices might go on the tip of the arm, together with a 3D-printed titanium scoop for accumulating samples from a celestial physique’s floor. Just like the arm on NASA’s InSight Mars lander, COLDArm might additionally deploy devices to the floor.

This previous September, in a JPL check mattress full of materials to simulate lunar regolith (damaged rock and dust on the moon), COLDArm efficiently accomplished experiments that assessed its skill to assemble information on the properties of that regolith. Now COLDArm has been despatched on to finish the identical rigorous testing in spacelike situations that each mission faces. It is concentrating on a launch within the late 2020s.

What makes COLDarm work

A number of key new applied sciences enable the COLDArm system to perform in excessive environments. First, the arm makes use of gears made from bulk metallic glass, a strong metallic materials with a singular composition and construction that makes it harder than ceramic and twice as sturdy as metal, with higher elastic properties than both. These gears require no lubrication or heating to perform within the chilly.

As a result of the arm’s chilly motor controllers do not have to be stored heat in an electronics field close to the core of the spacecraft, they are often put in nearer to the science devices, requiring no insulation and fewer heavy cabling.

And a sensor embedded in COLDArm’s “wrist” provides the arm suggestions, permitting it to “really feel” what it is doing in all instructions, like a human jiggling a key right into a keyhole and turning the lock. That system, known as a six-axis power torque sensor, can even function in excessive chilly.

Along with using cameras designed for industrial use, COLDArm leverages different know-how that has been confirmed aboard Ingenuity: a robust processor akin to these utilized in shopper smartphones and open-source flight software program, known as F Prime, that JPL developed. Just like the Mars helicopter, COLDArm might function autonomously, performing duties and accumulating footage and sensor information with out real-time enter from mission controllers again on Earth.

Motiv Area Programs, a associate on COLDArm, developed the chilly motor controllers and in addition constructed sections of the arm and assembled it from JPL-supplied components on the firm’s Pasadena, California, facility.