Arkane Works №01 · Archived Record

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Moon Presence

Moon Presence began as an entry to NASA's Watts on the Moon Challenge: a cable-laying rover system for distributing power across the lunar surface to Artemis-era sites, connecting 100 kWh battery hubs into a scalable network. The design problem is the environment — −180 °C nights, +130 °C days, abrasive regolith, 14-day light/dark cycles — and the work centered on a trenching mechanism and thermal resilience that survive it. I served as project manager on a small multidisciplinary team, and the study kept growing for five years.

Environment−180 / +130 °C
Battery Hubs100 kWh
Fission Study40–100 kW
FidelityTRL 4–5
Trenching & Mobility.02

The rover lays cable with a scoop-and-conveyor trenching tool adapted from an electric dog-fence cable layer — displacing regolith while keeping dust generation low. The chassis adapts the JAXA–Toyota Lunar Cruiser platform for stability on uneven terrain. Early ANSYS cases on ceramic cable coatings checked structural integrity under 1/6 g loading and thermal cycling across the full lunar swing.

Environment & Materials.03

Abrasive regolith drives wear; lunar night drives storage. Titanium alloys were selected for trenching surfaces, cable insulation was sized for thermal extremes, and preliminary ANSYS thermal runs predicted manageable conductor temperatures through the 14-day night. As project manager I carried the power-delivery budget against NASA's mass and cost constraints — systems-level bookkeeping that decided more of the design than any single component did.

Expanded Architecture.04

For Amentum's "Back to the Moon" Challenge, the study grew past cable-laying into a nuclear-enhanced power architecture: an in-situ 40–100 kW fission reactor integrated with ISRU regolith processing, plasma boring for lava-tube habitat excavation, and electrostatic dust mitigation — carried to TRL 4–5 concept fidelity, with on-site generation cutting projected mission resupply by 20–30%.

MicroChariot Wheels.05

A parallel thread for NASA's Rock and Roll Challenge developed compliant, lightweight wheel/tire prototypes for the MicroChariot rover — 19-inch wheels carrying a 100 lb payload across simulated regolith, designed for a −250 °F to +250 °F operating range. The geometry trades shock absorption against regolith durability, and scales toward Artemis-class mobility requirements.

References.06