Spring-loaded Robot Could Explore the Asteroid Belt Almost Indefinitely

The asteroid belt beckons – it contains enough resources for humans to expand into the entire rest of the solar system and has no biosphere to speak of. Essentially, it is a giant mine just waiting to be exploited. So, a student team from the University of Texas at Austin has devised a plan to exploit it as part of the Revolutionary Aerospace System Concepts – Academic Linkage (RASC-AL), a competition sponsored by NASA to encourage undergraduate and graduate students to develop innovative ideas to solve some of space exploration’s challenges. UT Austin’s submission to the competition last year, known as the Autonomous Exploration Through Extraterrestrial Regions (AETHER) project, certainly fits that bill.

AETHER was submitted to the AI-Powered Self-Replicating Probes sub-section of RASC-AL 2024, which solicited ideas that would advance John von Neumann’s idea of a self-replicating space probe. AETHER addresses those challenges in two distinct ways.

First, it combines a spring-loaded landing system and a metal-burning rocket engine to hop between different asteroids in the belt. To fuel its rocket, it uses a system to harvest water and metal (specifically aluminum) from the surface of the asteroid it’s currently on, splits it into its components, and then dumps them into a fuel tank that can be used to power its next trip to a different asteroid. All of this is powered by a Kilowatt Reactor Using Stirling TechnoloY (KRUSTY) nuclear reactor that has been undergoing NASA and DoE testing for over a decade.

The springs in AETHER’s legs have a two-fold purpose. First, they allow for a soft landing on the surface of the gravitationally weak asteroid and can transfer some of the energy created by that landing into stored energy, which can be used to launch the system from its landing place later. It also has a set of wheels to navigate around the asteroid’s surface. When it’s time to jump off again, it replants its legs and springs back into space – with a little help from its rocket engine.

The rocket engine designed as part of AETHER can burn metal, such as aluminum, that the craft harvests from the asteroid to use as fuel. It is the primary system designed to take the craft from asteroid to asteroid, and it is meant to be a high-delta-v option for doing so quickly.

AETHER also tries to mimic a von Neumann probe by using a machine-learning algorithm to improve its resource-harvesting efforts. It would take data from various sensors, including synthetic aperture radar and a spectrometer, and estimate where the best spot would be to land to refuel. While collecting that additional fuel material, it would communicate back with Earth via a high-speed optical communication link, allowing an Earth-based server to update the machine learning parameters and improve the algorithm’s outcome for the next hop.

The original mission design for AETHER has it stopping at two specific asteroids before moving on to as-yet-unnamed ones. The first, which is probably no surprise, is Psyche, the big metallic asteroid that is about to be visited by its own dedicated probe. Data from that probe will help inform the first iteration of AETHER’s learning algorithm, and the input the sensors provide from its visit will update it before its next step – Themis. That asteroid, though smaller, is expected to contain a large amount of water ice, which is a necessary component for AETHER’s rocket engines.

After visiting the first two asteroids, the mission moves on to places unknown, as completing those steps would be considered a success. But given the longevity of the KRUSTY reactor and the craft’s ability to refill its own fuel tank, it is possible, or even likely, that AETHER would consider operating well past its rendezvous with Themis.

The UT Austin team was comprised entirely of undergraduate students, though it’s unclear what year of study they were in. But, given their experience with the 2024 version of RASC-AL, they would seem well-placed to submit a project proposal for the recently announced 2025 version. If they do, hopefully, their idea will be just as innovative as AETHER’s.

Learn More:
Flores et al – AETHER
UT – Miniaturized Jumping Robots Could Study An Asteroid’s Gravity
UT – NASA Funds the Development of a Nuclear Reactor on the Moon That Would Last for 10 Years
UT – Engineers Design a Robot That Can Stick To, Crawl Along, and Sail Around Rubble Pile Asteroids

Lead Image:
Landing and take-off depiction of AETHER.
Credit – Flores et al.

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