The First Extraterrestrial Cave Exploration Mission
Stone Aerospace is developing LUX, a revolutionary sub-selenian space exploration vehicle. It is a hovering robotic vehicle designed to breach inaccessible lunar lava tubes, such as the Mare Tranquillitatis Pit. Acting as the lunar equivalent of an aerial drone, LUX explores subsurface voids unreachable by traditional wheeled rovers or ballistic hoppers. The project leverages Stone Aerospace’s deep heritage in deploying autonomous underwater vehicles in Earth’s most extreme truly unexplored environments.
Preliminary concept of LUX
Key Technological Highlights
Fully Autonomous Navigation: Features six-degree-of-freedom controlled flight guided by field-proven 3D-SLAM algorithms, high speed LIDAR, radar and Stone Aerospace’s proprietary subterranean exploration behavior code. The vehicle makes its own decisions on what and how to explore into completely unknown overhead terrain without human intervention.
Fiber-Optic Waveguide: LUX self-deploys a multi-kilometer ultra-thin waveguide for high-bandwidth, non-line-of-sight communications. Mission success is guaranteed as all data is already transferred back to a relay lander prior to any mission-terminating event.
Laser Power-over-Fiber (PoF): Multi-kilowatt laser power is beamed down the fiber tether from a surface lander to recharge onboard batteries. This also enables a NASA NIAC Phase I-awarded, non-polluting propulsion system.
By enabling kilometer-plus cave penetrations, LUX establishes a robust technical roadmap for sustained robotic and human presence on the Moon and Martian caves.
Read more about LUX on NASA’s website.