The prospect of mining the moon to extract valuable resources that facilitates upcoming space exploration is what the space industry invests in, in recent years.The Lunar exploration is a solid stepping stone to enable further space exploratory missions, especially Mars. However, Moon mining is extremely complex and requires infrastructure before it begins. The CSMC is a Lunar regolith mining company which aims to process oxygen and hydrogen for both fuel and life support in-situ. Since it costs a fortune to transport the resources to the Moon’s sites, these operations will support the development of the infrastructure and technology necessary to create a robust ex-terran economy, benefiting humanity for generations to come. To fulfill this goal, the existing resources in the regolith should be detected by 3D mapping the subterrain of the Moon using sensors. These sensors need to be deposited on the Moon by a rover and would relay the signals back to the rover (and eventually the earth) for processing.

This project develops a conceptual design for the configuration and deployment of the sensor probes and analysis. This concept would then form the basis for weight, and stowed envelope estimates as well as ConOps requirements. Then the design undergoes structural analysis to validate the concept’s reliability.

The main focus of this thesis is on the structural analysis of the design and evaluating it based on the stress and vibration requirements in excessive environmental conditions. To do so, we used the general steps of NASA’s structural analysis procedure in the conceptual design phase which includes stress analysis, modal analysis, optimization, and redesign. Optimizing the weight of the structure has significant importance in the space sector. So, considering the trade-off between the weight and strength of the structure we redesigned the initial design to achieve lower weight.

The digital prototyping and analysis is conducted in Autodesk Inventor and the main parts of the systems are prototyped using the 3D printing method to validate the operation feasibility of the mechanism.