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The asteroid belt beckons \u2013 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 \u2013 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\u2019s challenges. UT Austin\u2019s submission to the competition last year, known as the Autonomous Exploration Through Extraterrestrial Regions (AETHER) project, certainly fits that bill.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n 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\u2019s idea of a self-replicating space probe. AETHER addresses those challenges in two distinct ways.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \n