Customer/Prospect
Lunar Surface Manipulation System
Field Tests at Moses Lake Washington

NASA may not plan to return to the moon for ten years, but that is not stopping them from conducting lunar expeditions.

This past June, research teams from seven NASA centers came together in Moses Lake Washington to conduct a two week long study on different mobility and payload handling activities that could take place in the lunar environment. One of the main reasons NASA picked Moses Lake from a list of twenty potential field sites was the fact that local soils and geology resemble those on the moon.

NASA engineers also liked the combination of flat, open terrain and rolling dunes in the 3,000 acre off-road vehicle park where they set up the testing facility.

 

These were the first trials of the Lunar Surface Manipulation System with a crane test bed for lunar operations. In order to perform the necessary tests, a lunar lander mockup was needed to test unloading of material from an elevated platform to the surface.

Engineers from the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton Virginia turned to item North America for design support that can meet the exact requirements for this application. After nearly 15 months of communication and engineering design work, item was awarded the contract for a structure that would be 2 meters tall, 5 meters in diameter, and had a static load capacity of 900 kg (2000 lbs.)

A major requirement of this particular structure was that it needed to be easy to assemble and disassemble in a timely fashion.

The structure also needed to be extremely easy to transport. To fulfill this requirement, item's engineering team came up with a design that allowed the platform to ship in eight pieces.

item designed a custom crate that safely harnessed the four pieces of the platform and the four legs as separate sub-structures.

This design coupled with creative packaging allowed NASA to quickly and easily re-assemble the lunar lander in much less time than anticipated.

 

After two weeks of testing, a NASA Engineer was quoted as saying. "The platform worked like a charm. Setup was painless, quick, easy and it was as solid as a rock. The take down was just as easy as the setup, and the platform had no problem with the unfavorable weather conditions. It was sand blasted off and on for two weeks, with 20 to 30 mile per hour winds."

Word of this cooperative partnership spread quickly as this story was detailed in an article in the German newspaper, "Die Welt" June, 23, 2008.

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