NEWARK, N.J., Sept. 22 -- New Jersey Institute of Technology issued the following news release:
NASA wants to establish sustained human presence on the lunar surface, but Houston has a problem - keeping the lights on when night falls on the Moon.
The lunar South Pole, whereNASA announced plans in March to build humanity's first long-term Moon base, sees two weeks of total darkness at a time, making surface solar power untenable. An outage could be catastrophic for life support systems, down to the habitat's oxygen supply.
So, an NJIT-led undergraduate team brought a new idea to NASA - move the power source off the Moon entirely and instead power it with a swarm of solar-harvesting robots from space.
The six-member team, known as Star Ma...