A team of researchers from the universities of Oviedo and Vigo are working in Lanzarote on a project to design, manufacture and test antennas so that the exploration vehicles used on the Moon, better known as "rovers", can communicate inside the caves that the satellite has and can send information from its interior.
The researchers of this project, called 'Antennas for Underground Communications' and financed by the European Space Agency, are carrying out tests in the volcanic caves of Lanzarote, "a great analogue" of the lunar cavities, as they have pointed out in a statement from the Asturian academic institution.
Specifically, the measurements have been taken in the Los Naturalistas cave and in the lava tube of the La Corona volcano. The researchers recall that there is currently great interest in returning to the Moon, "but this time to stay." The problem, they warn, lies in the fact that the lunar surface is a "extremely hostile environment", with temperatures around "150 degrees Celsius during the day", 150 degrees Celsius below zero at night and a large amount of "solar radiation" potentially carcinogenic.
According to the researcher from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Computer Electronics and Systems of the University of Oviedo, Germán León Fernández, a possible solution has been found in "the lunar lava tubes", "cavities formed during volcanic eruptions in the remote lunar past" that could provide shelter to humans.
The first step for its colonization consists of the "robotic exploration" of its interior, an aspect on which the project focuses. For this, the researcher explained, "a light and portable measurement system has been designed to be able to transport it inside these caves" and measurements have been made in different scenarios (elbows, narrowings or landslides) "to characterize the largest number of cases that an exploring robot may face on the Moon."
"With the measurements taken, we seek to validate the physical models developed by our team of researchers. Both these models and the measurements taken will be used to optimize the communication system of future exploration robots," added Alejandro Gómez San Juan, researcher at the atlanTTiC center of the University of Vigo.
