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Lunar exploration equipment at any future lunar base is in danger from debris blasted toward it by subsequent lunar landers. This danger isn\u2019t just theoretical \u2013 Surveyor III was a lander during the Apollo era that was damaged by Apollo 12\u2019s descent rocket and returned to Earth for closer examination. Plenty of ideas have been put forward to limit this risk, and we\u2019ve reported on many of them, from constructing landing pads out of melted regolith to 3D printing a blast shield out of available materials. But a new paper from researchers in Switzerland suggests a much simpler idea \u2013 why not just build a blast wall by stacking a bunch of rocks together?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n On the Moon, that task isn\u2019t as simple as it sounds. It would require an autonomous excavator to assess the rocks, collect them, and stack them on top of each other so that they wouldn\u2019t fall over. Depending on the size of the rocks, that task could be completed successfully by a toddler, but for a robot, it remained in the realm of science fiction, at least until recently.<\/p>\n Another paper by some of the same co-authors described an autonomous boulder-stacking robot for use in construction projects on Earth. In it, they showed a control algorithm that could successfully stack a rock wall together using medium-sized boulders entirely autonomously. Applying it to lunar construction seemed like the next obvious step.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n