Beehive disintegrated in space along with the ashes of three American presidents.
Vaporized along with Eisenhower, Washington and Kennedy was the last great Mexican innovation.
Thursday was the day of the cremation.
The
Pilgrim ship
It crashed into the Earth's atmosphere by decision of the company Astrobotic, responsible for the project, to prevent the module from becoming space debris.
The trip, which began from Cape Canaveral, Florida (United States), ended after 10 days of round trip to lunar orbit.
The ship could not land on the satellite, as planned, due to a fuel leak, but it allowed five small robots to become the first Mexican devices to reach deep space.
Their journey is now the springboard for the next ones.
There is no feeling of failure in the UNAM Space Instrumentation Laboratory.
On the contrary: what 250 students led by researcher Gustavo Medina have achieved is to convert bachelor's, master's and doctoral theses, social services and university internships, into a real mission.
Nine years ago, in the rooms of the Institute of Nuclear Sciences, the project that has led five robots the size of a cookie to survive 385,000 kilometers from Earth began to take shape.
The 3D printer that materialized the robots is working in the laboratory, the capsule that allowed us to imitate the vacuum of space and also bring the devices to a temperature of 120 degrees and minus 120 degrees, the clean room where the components were tested without contamination .
It is here where the Colmena team carried out the main tests, here where all the previous ones that reached space were broken and damaged.
David Padilla, an industrial engineering student who has been participating in the project for six years and is finishing his doctorate on space debris, explains that one of the challenges was to withstand the vibration and acceleration that shakes the ship when the rocket takes off.
In addition to temperature variation, pressure changes, solar radiation, which can appear in the interplanetary medium.
Space is not easy.
Robots built by the LINX project on a simulated lunar dust surface.
Nayeli Cruz
In this room with students, inside a transparent box, four of the robots rest on simulated lunar dust.
Since the final objective of the devices was to move on the Moon, the UNAM team began to create regolith.
They produced two types: 16 tons of a simpler powder that they obtained with a mining company, using basalts and lavas from Malinche, “which look like the region of the Moon,” and a much finer one of which there are only a few. kilograms.
“Eight people were there for the latter for six months: they were trying to reproduce what fraction of grains of each size there are in the dust of the lunar regolith,” Gustavo Medina explains to EL PAÍS.
In another classroom is a
life-size part of
Pilgrim .
Recreated with aluminum foil and some replicas, it presides over the design room, between eclipse formulas on the blackboards and Colmena promotional posters.
The robots and their control module, called TTDM, traveled to space with 21 other projects.
Escorted by two NASA spectrometers, the ship also flew a German radiation detector, a Japanese time capsule with messages from 80,000 children from around the world, a piece of Mount Everest, a bitcoin from the Seychelles and a rover
vehicle
from Carnegie Mellon University.
Pilgrim
is a kind of postal service to the Moon.
In the early hours of January 8, this private initiative, which aims to inaugurate the commercial satellite transportation sector, took off successfully.
“The emotion was indescribable,” says Claudia Patricio, a Mechanical Engineering student and since 2019 in the Colmena project, “it is the moment in which all the teamwork in the laboratory is materialized and validated.”
However, a problem with a small valve caused one of the fuel tanks to burst.
The Astrobotics team lost control of the module for hours and had to use a lot of fuel to recover it and stabilize the ship.
There was not enough for the three weeks of travel and the soft, powered landing on the Moon.
Full-scale model of Peregrino.
Nayeli Cruz
Even so, the company decided to reach lunar orbit so that the teams on board could test their components outside the influence of the Earth's magnetic field.
“We had to propose a new strategy for us.
We began to do things that we would never have planned in deep space, a tremendously aggressive environment that, except in the dust, is very similar to the surface of the Moon," says Medina, "we turned on our electronics, which is something that is easy to say. , but there you are igniting yourself in a medium called plasma, which is a completely conductive gas that can deliver electric shocks and burn you all in a millisecond.”
They achieved it without problems, which showed them that the engineering of their robots was correct.
The entire study of the lunar regolith remains pending, a task that will be left to Colmena 2, planned for 2027. Although the robots will be completely different, because they will already be prepared to carry out, for example, some mining activity, the core that they have already verified will be maintained. it works.
“At UNAM we have at least three missions planned to the Moon, hopefully one more to an asteroid later.
Colmena is the first in the series of lunar missions,” says the person responsible for the project.
The objective behind these five microrobots is to participate in the great space race.
Medina explains, as if it were a science fiction series, that the Moon is “like a new continent that is going to be added to our civilization.”
“It will be incorporated into our socioeconomic activities starting in the 1930s. There will be industry, both to build large scientific experiments and to build housing for astronauts and spacecraft, which are what will eventually take us to Mars and to the asteroids,” says the physicist.
David Padilla, member of the LINX team, works in one of the laboratories of the Institute of Nuclear Sciences.Nayeli Cruz
In this revolution, led by the United States, Russia, China, India and the European Union, Mexico does not want to remain just a spectator.
Hence the microrobots: the Mexican niche in the universe is in the tiny.
Because the first thing that will be in that future lunar colony, according to Medina, will be autonomous machines.
The plan now is that those that come from Mexico will be small but there will be many.
Colmena did not arrive, but others will arrive.
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