Engineers and scientists from Orbital Mining Corp. (a Golden, Colorado start-up company) teamed up with the Mines Center for Space Resources (CSR) to test its Lunar SCRUB (Surface Cleaning Robotic Unit with electron-Beam) apparatus intended to solve the lunar dust problem with an electrostatic cleaning device. The project, featured in an Aerospace America article, aims to produce a toaster-sized metal box prototype that could be mounted on the robotic arm of an autonomous lunar terrain vehicle or carried by an astronaut and passed over surfaces at an arm’s length distance to lift the dust away. Orbital Mining Corp. is developing the device with another startup as subcontractor, Space Dust Research & Technologies (SDRT), under a NASA contract and testing the device at CSR’s vacuum chamber facility.
