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What's the best material for a lunar tower?

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2024-10-21 19:30:06

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

Physical infrastructure on the moon will be critical to any long-term human presence there as both America and China gear up for a sustained human lunar presence. Increasingly, a self-deploying tower is one of the most essential parts of that physical infrastructure.

These towers can hold numerous pieces of equipment, from solar panels to communications arrays, and the more weight they can hold in the lunar gravity, the more capable they become. So it's essential to understand the best structural set-up for these towers, which is the purpose of a recent paper by researchers at North Carolina State University and NASA's Langley Research Center.

Several technologies underpin that structure, which was developed under NASA's Self-Erectable Lunar Tower for Instruments (SELTI) project. One of the most important technologies is the material the tower consists of. In their study, the researchers looked at two types of material: the corrugated rollable tubular boom (COROTUB) and collapsible tubular mast (CTM).