Regolith Advanced Collector (RAC)

Last crawled date: 1 year, 10 months ago

The design consists of 2 main parts, the open top bucket and the rotating shovels. It utilizes two one way bearings (sprag clutch bearing), such as Tsubaki BB25-2K-K which was used in the design, on each end of the bucket shafts. One of the bucket shaft is connected to the rotating outer shovels' main shaft which then connected to the RASSOR main driving shaft. The bearing's clutch will lock and transfer the torque to rotate the bucket opening down when the outer shovels rotate in the counter clockwise direction.

The shovels rotate clockwise to collect the regolith and will pour it down into the bucket if it reaches the top. After the bucket is full, the bucket can be unloaded by rotating the outer shovels in the counter clockwise direction.

When the unloading process has finished and the shovels start to rotating back in the clockwise direction, the bucket will return to its original position (opening side face up) by the help of gravity. This can be achieved by lowering the center of mass of the bucket from the shaft axis. No excess regolith will spill once the main shaft stop rotating, the gravity shall keep the bucket's opening on top.

When the bucket is full it could hold up to 31.5 litres of regolith, which is 55% of the permissible volume (57.2 litres). Theoretically the shovels shall load up the bucket full in around 17 to 20 rotations and could unload in 2 rotations. Its mass is 4.8 kg and uses 6061 aluminium alloy material.