Emily Chan
Soon, the moon could be lit up with large lunar street lamps that double as solar-powered batteries. The installments will help pave the way for the development of future lunar habitats, complete with permanent human settlements, a floating train system, and new nuclear reactors. For those constructions to be made possible, the moon needs light.
On the moon, one day equals two Earth weeks. The nights are also long, freezing, and dark. The U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is providing funds for the private space technologies company Honeybee Robotics to build street lamps on the moon.
It is just one of 14 companies the agency has partnered with to make progress in lunar exploration as part of a wider initiative known as the 10-Year Lunar Architecture (LunA-10) Capability Study, which was launched last year.
The other companies selected by DARPA include Blue Origin, CisLunar Industries, Crescent Space Services LLC, Fibertek Inc., Firefly Aerospace, GITAI, Helios, ICON, Nokia of America, Northrop Grumman, Redwire Corporation, Sierra Space, and SpaceX.
“LunA-10 performers include companies both big and small, domestic and international, each of which brought a clear vision and technically rigorous plan for advancing quickly toward our goal: a self-sustaining, monetizable, commercially owned-and-operated lunar infrastructure. We’re excited to get started and to share results with the lunar community at large,” said Michael Nayak, the program manager in DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office.
The companies will add different contributions to the effort, such as methods of communication and navigation, robots to help with lunar construction, and lunar power.
The street lamps project, in particular, is called the Lunar Utility Navigation with Advanced Remote Sensing and Autonomous Beaming for Energy Redistribution (LUNARSABER).
According to Vishnu Sanigepalli, the project’s principal investigator, each lamp would stand at 330 feet tall. They will be designed to store solar energy during the day and then light up the area during the night.
The height of the lamps is necessary for them to surpass vast craters and elevate 0.9 tons of scientific equipment, like cameras and communication devices.
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