A team of researchers from ETH Zürich in Switzerland has suggested that robots could potentially build a dry stone wall to protect lunar bases on the moon from the rocket exhausts on the launch pad.

According to the proposal, robotic hydraulic excavators could be employed to autonomously build stone walls using materials found abundantly on the moon as building blocks — a solution that would eliminate the cost associated with transporting building materials from the Earth to the moon.

Source: NASASource: NASA

The proposed ring-shaped stone walls are expected to have a radius of roughly 164 ft to 328 ft, the researchers suggest, to protect against the rocket exhaust and dust that kicks up with every activity surrounding a launch, potentially damaging crafts as well as the colonies expected to be erected on the moon with the Artemis mission.

As such, the team is exploring whether or not a protective ring, or blast shield, erected around the launch pads on the moon could be accomplished using robotic hydraulic excavators.

To make this determination, the team initially used images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) to locate boulders that could be used for construction at two sites on the moon.

“The considered task thereby is to collect 250 m3 of boulders, which is about enough for a quarter ring segment of a blast shield,” the researchers explained.

The team details their proposal, and the challenges associated with their proposal, in the paper “Autonomous construction of lunar infrastructure with in-situ boulders," which appears in the journal Frontiers in Space Technologies.

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