Every month, we wish to highlight the exceptional work done by some of the best in the industry, to discuss what they have been up to and how they are contributing to the space industry. For this edition, we would like to highlight the work by Puli Space Technologies.
Hungary on the Moon! Puli Space Technologies, led by one of our speakers from SpaceTalks, Tibor Pacher won 1st place in the public prize competition called “Honey, I Shrunk the NASA Payload” challenge.
NASA intends to go back to the moon in 2024 with the Artemis program, and in order to ensure a sustainable presence in the moon, the agency aims to use several types of robots such as rovers for performing crucial tasks. In pursuance of this NASA created the “Honey, I Shrunk the NASA Payload” with the aim of selecting designs for smaller payloads that could be taken on the next mission to the moon. In order to qualify participants had to submit designs that were not bigger than 3.9 inches by 3.9 inches by 1.9 inches and not weigh more than 0.8 lbs.
The winning design called Puli Lunar Water Snooper identifies hydrogen and therefore all hydrogen-bearing volatiles like water ice, it measures quantity and distribution of these resources in the lunar surface regolith, mapping even a large area when mounted on a rover.
Commenting on the victory, David Lucsanyi, the Scientific Team Leader at Puli remarked ‘This challenge has provided us with a great opportunity to leverage our innovative ideas and engineering capabilities to show something interesting to NASA as well, and to contribute to NASA’s moonscape mission in the near future. These missions mostly focus on the search for water ice, for which longer, sustainable human missions are indispensable.
We will definitely further develop our winning concept, which is also of great interest at an international level, and we hope that in 2022 our measuring device will map the usable water resources on the surface of the Moon at the bottom of a small rover. We will continue our recent work and we will not stop until we reach the Moon!’
Tibor Pacher, the CEO of Puli Space also told Cosmonauts, ‘I am very pleased with the recognition and I am proud of the work of the team. The Puli team believes that by working together, Hungary can join a very narrow group of countries that are able to reach another celestial body and participate in the utilization of the Moon’s resources and the creation of a new, innovation-based economy. To use the words of Szechenyi: ‘Everything is difficult for one, nothing is impossible for many.’
Currently, the Puli Space team is in the process of a crowdfunding campaign, in order to deliver Spacetime plaque to the Moon. The aluminium plaque – which contains messages and pictures recording our world, life and achievements as well as prominent people, places and communities, will be delivered on a microfilm which will be placed in a time capsule. The Puli team has partnered up with Astrobotic, who also delivers 11 scientific instruments from NASA on its Peregrine lander.
If you wish to learn more, please visit their crowdfunding page here: https://app.tokeportal.hu/projects/donation/6
Follow us on social media
Categorised in: Space Tech