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Success Stories

Resolve Project

Sep 18, 2013
NORCAT / EVC has been working with NASA on the RESOLVE project since 2004 and continues to do so.
 
The RESOLVE project (Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen and Lunar Volatile Extraction) is an experiment package designed to obtain ‘ground truth’ data to confirm the presence of hydrogen, potentially in the form of water ice, on the moon, as indicated by the Clementine and Lunar Prospector missions.
 
NORCAT’s role has been to develop an Excavation and Bulk Regolith Characterization (EBRC) Module – essentially a drill with sample capture and a particle size reduction unit. The drill has been integrated with a lunar rover built by Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics group and field tested during a series of analogue deployments in 2008. In 2012, the system was integrated to a NORCAT built mobility platform, along with the rest of the RESOLVE project, and deployed as part of a three week long analogue mission.
 
In July 2012, the next generation of the drill for RESOLVE, developed under contract to the Canadian Space Agency, was deployed with the RESOLVE analysis package and spectrophotometers, on a Canadian rover evolved from the mobility platform built by NORCAT and utilized in the 2010 deployment. This analogue mission marked a significant advancement of the RESOLVE project with respect to integration and relevance to a real mission scenario; human presence in the field with the hardware was minimal with operations directed from mission control centres located near the site or thousands of kilometers from the site in the US and Canada.


NASA Awards
 


Group Achievement Award as part of In-Situ Resource Utilization Analog Demo Team
For exemplary service to the Agency in conducting the In-Situ Resource Utilization field demonstration at the Hale Pohaku Crater, Hawaii, analog site.
 
Group Achievement Award as part of ISLO-ISRU 2012 Field Test Team
For outstanding efforts in support of the 2010 International Lunar Surface Operations In-Situ Resource Utilization Field Test.
 
Group Achievement Award as part of ISRU RESOLVE Team
For outstanding efforts for the development and deployment of Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen and Lunar Volatile Extraction System at a lunar analog site.

Source: http://www.norcat.org/success-stories.html