Preliminary Results for the Multi-Robot, Multi-Partner, Multi-Mission, Planetary Exploration Analogue Campaign on Mount Etna

This paper was initially intended to report on the outcome of the twice postponed demonstration mission of the ARCHES project. Due to the global COVID pandemic, it has been postponed from 2020, then 2021, to 2022. Nevertheless, the development of our concepts and integration has progressed rapidly, and some of the preliminary results are worthwhile to share with the community to drive the dialog on robotics planetary exploration strategies. This paper includes an overview of the planned 4-week campaign, as well as the vision and relevance of the missiontowards the planned official space missions. Furthermore, the cooperative aspect of the robotic teams, the scientific motivation, the sub task achievements are summarised

Finally! Insights into the ARCHES Lunar Planetary Exploration Analogue Campaign on Etna in summer 2022

This paper summarises the first outcomes of the space demonstration mission of the ARCHES project which could have been performed this year from 13 june until 10 july on Italy’s Mt. Etna in Sicily. After the second postponement related to COVID from the initially for 2020 planed campaign, we are now very happy to report, that the whole campaign with more than 65 participants for four weeks has been successfully conduced. In this short overview paper, we will refer to all other publication here on IAC22. This paper includes an overview of the performed 4-week campaign and the achieved mission goals and first results but also share our findings on the organisational and planning aspects

Simultaneously Recovery of Thorium and Tungsten through Hybrid Electrolysis–Nanofiltration Processes

The recovery and recycling of metals that generate toxic ions in the environment is of particular importance, especially when these are tungsten and, in particular, thorium. The radioactive element thorium has unexpectedly accessible domestic applications (filaments of light bulbs and electronic tubes, welding electrodes, and working alloys containing aluminum and magnesium), which lead to its appearance in electrical and electronic waste from municipal waste management platforms. The current paper proposes the simultaneous recovery of waste containing tungsten and thorium from welding electrodes. Simultaneous recovery is achieved by applying a hybrid membrane electrolysis technology coupled with nanofiltration. An electrolysis cell with sulphonated polyether–ether–ketone membranes (sPEEK) and a nanofiltration module with chitosan–polypropylene membranes (C–PHF–M) are used to carry out the hybrid process. The analysis of welding electrodes led to a composition of W (tungsten) 89.4%; Th 7.1%; O2 2.5%; and Al 1.1%. Thus, the parameters of the electrolysis process were chosen according to the speciation of the three metals suggested by the superimposed Pourbaix diagrams. At a constant potential of 20.0 V and an electrolysis current of 1.0 A, the pH is varied and the possible composition of the solution in the anodic workspace is analyzed. Favorable conditions for both electrolysis and nanofiltration were obtained at pH from 6 to 9, when the soluble tungstate ion, the aluminum hydroxide, and solid thorium dioxide were formed. Through the first nanofiltration, the tungstate ion is obtained in the permeate, and thorium dioxide and aluminum hydroxide in the concentrate. By adding a pH 13 solution over the two precipitates, the aluminum is solubilized as sodium aluminate, which will be found after the second nanofiltration in the permeate, with the thorium dioxide remaining integrally (within an error of ±0.1 ppm) on the C–PHF–M membrane

Thorium Recovery with Crown Ether–Polymer Composite Membranes

Thorium is a weak radioactive element, but the control of its concentration in natural aqueous systems is of great interest for health, because it is a toxic heavy metal. The present paper presents the recovery of thorium from diluted synthetic aqueous systems by nanofiltration. The membranes used for the nanofiltration of systems containing thorium species are composites containing 4′-Aminobenzo-15-crown-5 ether (ABCE) and sulfonated poly–etherether–ketone (sPEEK). The composite membranes (ABCE–sPEEK) were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy-dispersive X–Ray spectroscopy (EDAX), thermal analysis (TG and DSC), and from the perspective of thorium removal performance. To determine the process performance, the variables were the following: the nature of the composite membrane, the concentration of thorium in the aqueous systems, the rotation speed of the stirrer, and the pressure and the pH of the thorium aqueous system. When using pure water, a permeate flux value of 12 L·m−2 h−1 was obtained for the sPEEK membrane, and a permeate flux value of up to 15 L·m−2 h−1 was obtained for the ABCE–sPEEK composite membrane. The use of mechanical stirring, with a propeller stirrer, lead to an increase in the permeate flux value of pure water by about 20% for each of the studied membranes. Depending on the concentration of thorium and the pH of the feed solution, retentions between 84.9% and 98.4% were obtained. An important observation was the retention jump at pH 2 for the ABCE–sPEEK composite membrane. In the paper, a thorium ion retention mechanism is proposed for the sPEEK membrane and the ABCE–sPEEK composite membrane

The ARCHES Space-Analogue Demonstration Mission: Towards Heterogeneous Teams of Autonomous Robots for Collaborative Scientific Sampling in Planetary Exploration

Teams of mobile robots will play a crucial role in future missions to explore the surfaces of extraterrestrial bodies. Setting up infrastructure and taking scientific samples are expensive tasks when operating in distant, challenging, and unknown environments. In contrast to current single-robot space missions, future heterogeneous robotic teams will increase efficiency via enhanced autonomy and parallelization, improve robustness via functional redundancy, as well as benefit from complementary capabilities of the individual robots. In this letter, we present our heterogeneous robotic team, consisting of flying and driving robots that we plan to deploy on scientific sampling demonstration missions at a Moon-analogue site on Mt. Etna, Sicily, Italy in 2021 as part of the ARCHES project. We describe the robots' individual capabilities and their roles in two mission scenarios. We then present components and experiments on important tasks therein: automated task planning, high-level mission control, spectral rock analysis, radio-based localization, collaborative multi-robot 6D SLAM in Moon-analogue and Mars-like scenarios, and demonstrations of autonomous sample return